Opportunities for Generosity
How often do you think about being generous? When you think about generosity and being generous what do you think of? Do you immediately think of certain times of the year or about giving money to a cause that you think is worthy? We actually have an abundance of opportunities to be generous and many of them will not even cost you a penny.
Generosity does not just mean giving money to a cause. We have opportunities each and every day to be generous with how we spend our time. We can be generous with sharing our knowledge. We can be generous with sharing something that we have an abundance of.
It is almost divine timing that I am writing about this topic this week when I made the list of 52 way to look at abundance the first week of January. Yet now as I write this, it is the end of March and when I looked at the topic that I had brainstormed almost three months ago this topic could not be more perfect for what happened in my life this week.
At the start of the week I came home and noticed it was really cold in my house when I popped home quickly to pick up my daughter. So I turned up the heat, grabbed my daughter for her volleyball practice and headed out the door. Then, when we came home it was still really cold in the house. It was now after dinner time and I was starting to worry that my furnace was not working. (I live in Canada and the temperature had dropped below minus ten degrees celsius and was going to be cold for a few days). Being a single mom and having basically zero mechanical skills, I did what little I knew to do to check if the furnace was not working or if I had blown a breaker somehow. Then I called a friend, who has mechanical skills and lives a few blocks away, I asked them to come over and take a look for me before I called the furnace people to check that there was nothing blaringly simple that I had missed to check.
My friend quickly popped over and confirmed that my furnace was indeed not working. Then I called two repair places that did 24 hour emergency repair and both places could not come that night. I was freezing in my house and starting to drop below 15 degrees celsius in the house. As we looked the furnace I noticed that the furnace repair sticker had furnace and air conditioning as their expertise. I remembered one of the players on my co-ed soccer team did air conditioning so I reached out to our soccer teams group chat. Little did I know, but two of the players on my team actually specialized in furnace repair. One of my teammates spent almost an hour on facetime with my friend and talked him through what to check on the furnace. They discovered the problem and what part was broken. Then my teammate checked all of his employees to see if they had the part we needed to fix my furnace that night so my daughter and I would not be cold. He was not able to find the part but promised he would get it for me in the morning and come over and fix it.
My biggest worry was that with no furnace and cold temperatures my house would get too cold and the pipes would burst or something. He assured me it wouldn’t so I just zipped over to the walmart and bought two space heaters to make the house not too cold for the night for me and my daughter. Which made the world of difference.
The next morning my teammate came over and with the part to fix my furnace and only charged me the cost of the part. As a single mom the level of generosity that my teammate gave to me and my daughter in his time and willingness to only charge me for the part was above and beyond what I could have ever even hoped for. I was willing to pay and he would not accept it. He just said that is what teammates do for each other.
Sometimes, generosity is not money at all. It is your willingness to go out of your way and help someone in need when you have the expertise to help them in that moment. It is going above and beyond to help out a friend with your time like both my neighbour friend and teammate did for me. I am so completely grateful for the generosity showed me this week. I am beyond blown away at the divine timing of the topic I scribbled down for this weeks focus on abundance and how easy it was for me to connect generosity to my real life experience.
Take some time this week to take notice of when someone does spreads generosity without expecting anything in return. Are there times that you can be generous with your time or expertise and help out another? Take some time to reflect on when someone has been generous and send gratitude to them. We truly do have opportunities for an abundance of gratitude if we choose to look.
