Err on the Side of Charity
By Susan Law Corpany

When I was in kindergarten, my mother and the mother of my friend, Vondra, were very concerned when the two of us were not home from school when we should have been. They set out to find us and discovered two little girls, walking very slowly home from school, carrying long sticks with earthworms draped over them. We had been picking them up from the sidewalk after a rainstorm, worried about saving the worms from being stepped on.

The older I’ve gotten, the further I have moved away from the pure charity of childhood. As adults we scrutinize each worm for worthiness, we debate whether or not it is the worm’s fault for coming out onto the sidewalk in the first place, or we decide we can’t spare the effort or the time.

In doing research for a novel on which I am working called Unto the Least of These, I recently had lunch with a homeless fellow. I provided the Kentucky Fried Chicken in exchange for asking him a few questions about what it is like to be homeless. We sat on the sidewalk on the corner near the grocery store where I shop, eating chicken in the rain. He kindly gave me his cardboard sign to sit on and held his umbrella over my head when the rain came down hardest.

He told me that he had found the discarded umbrella when he came to rainy Hilo and considered it a sign that the Lord was watching out for him in some small way. I thought about how the less we have, the more we are grateful for small things. Conversely, the more we have, the less grateful we become for life’s little gifts.

As I write this book, I struggle to come to terms with my own feelings about those around us who are down and out. I like to believe I am a charitable person, but I don’t believe any of us are can fairly judge our own virtues and vices. As the story unfolds, I consider many of the attitudes that are prevalent and voice these through different characters. In one scene, I have two ladies arguing both sides of this issue, and it felt like me having a debate with myself. In the final analysis, I have realized that if I am going to be found on one side of that fence or the other, I would like to err on the side of charity.

Taking Measure

I remember a conversation with a friend wherein he stated that service is the ultimate selfishness, if we do it for the express purpose of “earning” a place in the kingdom. So much of what we do is measured — attendance rolls, awards for achievement, years of service in a calling. We need to remember the measure God takes of us.

One of the things that interferes in our desires to be charitable is the measure we take of a person putting a petition to us.

Does he really want to work or is that sign just his way of getting a handout?

Is she really crippled or is she faking it for sympathy?

If I give him money, what is he really going to spend it on?

These are not unfair questions. While traveling last summer, we encountered someone who handed us a slip of paper with a story about a hospitalized father, travel funds that had run out, and so on. It all sounded very familiar. My husband took a second look at this young woman, and since we had been in that same city a year ago, he remembered her. “Your father is still in the hospital?” He offered, just as he had done the previous summer, to buy her lunch, which apparently was not what she was interested in.

The problem with asking these questions is that we set ourselves up as a judge. While from time to time we may even assess a situation accurately and fairly, the more we judge, the more we tend to believe in our ability to render judgment, and therein lies the danger. After experiences like this it is easy to start painting everyone with a broad brush, and soon we lump them together into one category and use our negative experiences as a reason to ignore them all. We deny them, and in doing so we deny ourselves the opportunity to develop the traits we need in order to be Christlike.

King Benjamin, in what my husband calls his “retirement speech” speaks very clearly to this problem, which has not ceased to exist down through the ages:

After experiences like this, it is easy to start painting everyone with a broad brush, and soon we lump them all together into one undesirable category and use our negative experiences as a reason to ignore them all. In the book, I have written a scene where the adults are debating the finer points of the issue, showing different viewpoints. As this discussion takes place, their teen-age daughters are surreptitiously putting together a Thanksgiving meal to take to the homeless man in the neighborhood, because they know that some of their parents are trying to rid the neighborhood of this man and will not be happy with them for having any contact with him.

Are we wrong to take measure of a person before giving a handout? In talking with my new friend, Roy, I found out that even the homeless take stock of each other. It is human nature to do so.

According to him, you’ve got the druggies, the crazies, even people who will deliberately try to become ill to get priority treatment. Then you’ve got people who are just temporarily down on their luck, displaced families, battered women, people who struggle to survive and desire to once again become employable and employed and who hope to move off the streets.

He told me of protecting himself against disease by getting a fresh piece of cardboard each night to sleep on and not frequenting areas where others sleep, where staph and other infections run rampant, how certain groups of homeless people try to avoid contact with other groups, in order to protect their safety, preserve their sanity, and maintain some semblance of dignity.

I am not endeavoring to answer all the questions this issue poses. Each of us must find his or her own answers, in each instance, with each encounter, according to his own judgment, according to his own heart, according to the whisperings of the spirit. The harried clerk at Wal-Mart might be more in need of my charity than the homeless person outside as she struggles to change the cash register roll with a row of impatient people in line.

Daily opportunities for charity abound, with most opportunities within reach, at the workplace, on the road, and in our families. Charity needs to be our way of life, extended to all, not just an occasional handout. If we clothe ourselves with charity, the debate will cease and our hearts will dictate appropriate actions as each situation warrants. Any time I find myself debating a principle, it is usually because I am trying to find a way to keep from living it as fully as I know I should.

We can make what passes as a “charitable donation” without being possessed of the virtue of charity. Years ago working for an estate planning attorney, I became aware that the generous donations of many at the end of the year had more to do with tax breaks than with dedication to causes. On the other hand, they may well have sought to make donations to causes they believed in and were logically taking advantage of the tax breaks.

If it is difficult for us to gauge our own charitability, we likewise should not presume to hold our measuring tape up to others and pronounce our findings. Those who are truly charitable often do things quietly and behind the scenes, without receipt or fanfare, sometimes remaining anonymous, so possibly the most charitable among us might appear to be the least giving.

God does not have a list like that printed on the back of the program at the symphony listing “Benefactors, Friends of the Symphony” and so on, depending on the amounts given by each. He knows who has given all he could, who has given grudgingly, and who has always looked out for number one. He knows our hearts, and what is in our hearts has grown there based on our actions.

I am grateful that the ultimate judgment is in the hands of one who can judge righteously, because we so often botch it up regarding those to whom we choose to be charitable to (or not) and with our assessments of each other’s charitability. King Benjamin reminds us that we are all beggars.

We need to listen to those inner monologues, because we do need to take measure of our own level of charity. What do we say in our hearts?

Perhaps we would hear something like this:

When my son was about ten, he had started a small venture where businesses and neighbors saved their soda cans for him, and he would collect them, smash them and take them to the recycling center. He called it “Re-inCANation” and he had business cards he had designed himself with a Root Beer can sitting on a cloud strumming a harp and a thought bubble that said “In my next life, I want to be a can of Sprite.”

I remember well the day we “hit the jackpot” by finding a ton of empty beer cans behind a dormitory at the university. (A side bonus was that after he had poured stale beer out of quite a few cans, he was convinced he never wanted to touch the stuff. I suppose that was worth the cost of shampooing the carpet in the van so that our vehicle didn’t smell like a frat party on wheels when I drove to girls’ camp.)

After smashing all the cans he had collected and filling several large garbage bags, we loaded up the van to head to the recycling center. As we drove along the main road, we spotted an elderly man riding a three-wheeled bicycle. Every once in a while he would stop, get off the bike, and pick up a soda can he found near the sidewalk. He had about twenty cans in the huge wire basket attached to the back of his bicycle.

“Looks like he’s in the same business you are.”

“He hasn’t got very many cans.”

“He’s probably trying to get enough cans to buy something to eat.”

I don’t recall if there were a few moments where he may have debated with himself about the things he was planning to buy with his profits. After we had already passed the man, he asked me to pull over, and we waited for him to catch up with us.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.

“Yup!”

I watched him get out of the vehicle with three garbage bags full of smashed cans and empty them into the basket of the man on the bicycle until it was full to the brim. I will never forget the looks on both of their faces, one looked like he had won the lottery, and the other was glowing with a happiness that you can’t get by buying something for yourself, not even a Ninja Turtle action figure.

Did it matter how that man spent the money he received when he redeemed the cans? Was this act counted as righteousness to my son even if the funds went for something we might not have wanted to subsidize? Did he receive the benefit to his spirit from being truly charitable?

If someone misuses money given or misrepresents their cause, that is not the problem of the giver. Yes, we would all like to give to worthy causes. Somewhere along the way even fast offering funds have been misused. Do we stop paying fast offering as a result?

We load ourselves down with unnecessary baggage when we take on responsibility for things beyond our control. If we are concerned with abuse, we can offer food or clothing. We are told in the scriptures to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and we can do just that, offering goods instead of money. We should not, however, use the abuses as a reason not to give.

To Be Seen of Men

I have to admit that I struggle to be charitable at all the right times and for all the right reasons. By nature I am a storyteller, and stories of being able to help others are usually interesting, and I don’t shy from the telling. Often I find myself sharing something because it was a creative way to serve and someone else might enjoy the idea for future reference. Not lost on me, though, is the fact that it also makes me look good.

Because of this, I tried once to do something fairly substantial for someone and told myself I was not ever going to tell anyone what I had done. Because of the nature of the deed, it was known to the recipient. I had succeeded in keeping it to myself for quite a number of years, which was not an easy thing for me to do. Eventually, however, this friend of my mother’s told her what I had done.

In my contact with her, I had also done a small favor for her, taking her pick up her daughters up at the airport in Salt Lake City. In the telling somehow my mother has gotten confused between two things and has completely overblown what I did, saying this woman would never have been able to bring over her daughters from Guatemala without my financial help. In reality all I did was drive her to the airport.

Although I have tried to set the record straight, my mother persists in giving me credit for something I did not even do. I had tried so hard not to be “proud of my humility,” and it backfired. Perhaps I will try again sometime. Perhaps I already have. If someone has done something nice for you, and you don’t know who it was, it was probably me. Whoops! There I go again.

I would like to get to the point that my charitable actions are like cockroaches — for every one you can see, there are a hundred more that you can’t see. (Sorry, I live in the tropics, and that’s the metaphor that works for me here.) It seems like there are so many ways to get it wrong. How do we get it right?

Judgment Call

I don’t pick up hitchhikers, but one day I passed a couple of young fellows who looked like they were just trying to get to the beach with their boogie boards. Encouraged when they saw my brake lights, their faces broke out in big smiles. I thought better of it and drove on by. As I did so, their faces fell.

Their expressions were so genuine that I turned around and went back. I stopped, rolled down the window, told them I had twenty-three dollars and a digital camera, and if they were going to hold me up, I would just hand it all over and save them the time. They laughed and got in the Jeep. I had a nice visit with these two German tourists as I drove them down to the beach, yet I still believe that picking up hitchhikers is dangerous and should be discouraged. And yes, I still have my camera.

How and who we serve is often a judgment call, many times without much warning as opportunities present themselves. Spur-of-the-moment opportunities to do something kind are a good gauge of where our heart is at, because our first impulse is often very telling. Are we critical or do we just jump in and do what needs to be done? Do we over-analyze or do we just help?

Possession is 9/10s of the Law

King Benjamin gave us further reasons in Mosiah 4:26:

I believe, in the final analysis, it is not going to be a list of deeds that are enumerated, but rather, whether or not we possess of the virtue of charity. When the time comes for me to be judged, I really hope I’m holding a stick draped with earthworms.