Your Choice, Your Call

Moments by Fr Jerry Orbos SVD

In today’s Gospel (Lk. 6, 27-38), Jesus tells His disciples to choose how they want to live their lives, i.e., to live with greed, or to live with love. Let us look into our hearts today: Am I a giving person, or am I a getting person? Am I a giver or a taker?

If you are a giver, please check the quantity of your giving. As it were, do you give sparingly, just enough and never beyond your comfort zone? Do you know what “give until it hurts” means?

More than the quantity, please check the quality of your giving. Do you give generously, without expecting anything in return? Do you give with kindness and mercy, or is your giving accompanied with harshness, pride and arrogance? Do you give condescendingly, or worse, is your giving just a show for others to see, to earn praise and admiration? Is your giving true? Is your giving sincere? Or is your giving all about you?

True giving does not expect anything in return. And so it is that there are people who give, keeping a list of all they had given, and expecting recompense in return. Worse, their giving is laced with entitlement and reward issues. Theirs is the kind of giving with strings, lots of strings attached. Are you a person who gives with a hidden agenda?

Elections are coming again. Let us be careful of people who give us a lot of promises just to get our votes. Let us doubly be careful of candidates who give us money or favors to buy our votes. Once in power, they will steal from us the money they gave us, and will continue to steal from us much, much more, for a long, long time.