Right away I think of this story: my first truly sacrificial gift, and how it was given in ignorance that ripened into bitter regret.
I was about six, old enough to know how rare and wonderful a silver dollar was. My granddad gave these gleaming discs to us on our birthdays, and they were precious things. My sister never spent hers’, and I once bribed her out of one, but that’s a different story.
We were at our grandparent’s church—a place of plush carpet and gleaming wooden pews softened by long red cushions. When the offering was taken, I fumbled in my pockets for a quarter—then, as now, I felt a compunction to place something in the offering, even if it was from a panicky impulse not to be embarrassed in front of the solemn offering men in their suits, looking like Mafia envoys. As the velvet plum-colored pouch, split in half by slick walnut handles, passed me, I slipped in a quarter—a small offering, perhaps, even for a child like me who received allowances, but enough to get by, I thought, much better than a dime, say, or a handful of pennies, pathetic as they slide from the palm. In any case, I’d be guilt-free at least until communion, when my mother would cry and I’d struggle to come up with a list of sins to confess silently to God so I’d not drink unbearable punishment on myself. At least offering was over with.
But my sister passed the pouch to my father, as it disappeared out of reach down the aisle, I realized what I had done. Oh, no! My silver dollar. Given to me by the warm, old hands of my grey-haired grandfather. Given to me in love and in trust. I’d put it in a pouch with other meaningless coins, and it would be counted and dropped into the church coffers by more men in suits. Nobody would know how precious it was to me—nobody.
I pulled my mother’s ear down to my mouth and whispered, “I gave away my silver dollar. Into the offering!”
She sensed the desperation in my voice, I knew it. Would she help me retrieve it? God didn’t care what denominations the money came in, after all! Couldn’t I just give four quarters, the same amount of money but not the monumental treasure that my Granddad’s silver dollar was? I only got one once a year, and not even that often, since we lived overseas. Granddaddy had to go to the bank especially and exchange regular paper money for the silver dollars he’d place in his grandkid’s palm. Surely God would understand that this gift was too precious?
My mother leaned over in the church-way she had, where she could whisper in our ear without moving her eyes from the front of the church. “Never regret giving anything to God,” my mother whispered back.
What? Why did parents never understand?
I spent the rest of church—the scripture readings, the long sermon, right through the last hymn—in agony over my loss. I pictured how it had happened over and over again. I’d felt in my pockets, yanked out a silver coin, and tossed it in the offering pouch. I saw it disappear down the aisle again and again, and I thought about what my mother had said—never regret, never regret, never regret.
I still think about this moment. I don’t know if the loss of my silver dollar, which was of utmost significance to me at six, was a defining moment in my life, but the memory still defines me today, when I struggle to give away what’s precious. The giving, done in a moment of spirited generosity, perhaps, is not as hard as the trusting—the trusting that the one to whom I give can appreciate the gift enough, will be careful with what I have given—my money, my time, my children, my love.
God will take it all—and in my clearer moments, I realize it was never mine in the first place. I realize that there is no such thing as possession in the Great Story—that all things are entrusted, but not given away for keeps. God is not trustworthy in the way I want God to be. I want to receive a gift and hunker down in my favorite chair, savoring it without fear that a thing I love so much will be taken from me. But there are no such promises, and love rarely makes such promise. I can’t tell my children that their lives will be easy. I wish I could, and believe it, but I can’t.
One thing—no, two at least--that have not been given to me with any conditions. Love and grace. Love and grace—they are the sky, the stars, the ground, the ocean, the very air I breathe. No one can take these from me, and these I can give freely, freely, forever.
It’s the silver dollars I’m still struggling to find in my pockets, and knowing what I give, slip them into the offering basket. Today my silver dollar is my sense of security, control, and my knowledge of the future. Surely something else would do just as well. Surely it can’t be expected of me. Perhaps it’s not quite clear how much it means to me. And yet, I fumble about in the darkness of my pockets, untangle it from my grasping fingers, and let it go.
And as I watch it disappear down the aisle, as I watch other hands dropping coins—gifts that I cannot begin to understand or know—I feel panic, fear, grief—and then a growing sense that all is okay, not perhaps in the particulars, the lists of worries I love to obsess about—but in the large sense. I ask regret to leave me. All will be well. And all will be well. All manner of things will be well.
