March 3
Scripture: Prov 15:23
Source author: Diane Buller
March 13
The Power of Anonymous Giving Give your gifts in private, and your Father, who sees everything, will reward you. —Matthew 6:4
Standing at my door, the deliveryman handed me a dozen perfectly arranged red roses. “Who are they from?” I asked. Just a week before, a two-year relationship I’d been in had ended, leaving me broken and facing my thirtieth birthday alone. The next afternoon, after I taught all day at school, I hurried into the florist and begged one of my high school students who worked there to tell me who sent the flowers. Reluctantly, he revealed the source. Twenty-five years later, I park down a street in a subdivision. The husband lost his job. The wife just had a baby. Gift bag in hand, I ring the doorbell. Then I run back and jump behind the steering wheel of my getaway van. Smiling, I drive home. I’m following a habit I began years earlier, following the example set for me that damp March morning when a much older teacher down the hall introduced anonymous giving to me with that extravagant bouquet of flowers. She spoke not words, but love to my disappointed and discouraged heart.
Giving is sometimes sweeter and purer when no card or signature is included. — Diane Buller —