Episode 1095: Creating a Spontaneous Giving Line

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining me on episode 1095 of the inspired stewardship podcast.

[00:00:06] Derek Gujardo: I'm Derek Gujardo from strong life coach. I encourage you to find your own journey to building your own strong life. And one way to be inspired to do that is by listening to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott, may.

[00:00:20] Scott Maderer: We actually have a line item on our budget that is focused on being able to do spontaneous giving. We just make sure that we set aside money each and every month. That we use to do that some months we go by and we don't use it, but then it builds up and eventually we do, we find a time and an opportunity that we're called to do it, and we do it welcome.

[00:00:43] And thank

[00:00:44] you

[00:00:44] Scott Maderer: for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast, [00:01:00] you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can the world.

[00:01:09] In today's episode about impacting the world through stewarding your treasures. I talk with you about what spontaneous giving is. I also share why I'm a fan of spontaneous giving. And I talk about creating a line item in your budget just to cover this. As we talk about stewarding your treasures, wouldn't it be great.

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[00:01:55] You may have been involved in what I call spontaneous giving [00:02:00] before. This is those acts of giving that just come up in a day to day way. This is the opportunity to leave a waiter or waitress, a bigger tip than normal. This is the opportunity to pay for the Starbucks in the line of the person behind you, or leave an extra tip for the barista or both.

[00:02:22] This is the opportunity to step forward and buy the groceries of that person. Who's in line behind you or in front of you. It's about buying dinner for the police officer, the firemen, or the military people that you see out. It's about finding ways to give when you're called to give, just because it's on your heart to do it.

[00:02:47] And there's millions of ways that you can do this. I'm a huge fan of spontaneous giving. This is something my wife and I have done for a long time. My wife is really good because she [00:03:00] has a heart for military and first responders. She often buys the meals of military and first responders that she sees out when they're dining.

[00:03:08] And she tries to do it in an anonymous way. There's other ways that we've done this in our life. And we're a big fan of this idea. In fact, we're such a fan of it that what we've done is we actually have a line item on our budget that is focused on being able to do spontaneous giving. We just. Make sure that we set aside money each and every month that we use to do that some months we go by and we don't use it, but then it builds up.

[00:03:36] And eventually we do, we find a time and an opportunity that we're called to do it, and we do it. And we don't have to think about it because we've actually set the money aside already. And so it's not harming any of our, or other goals or other giving or other things that we're doing. It's something that we've made front and center and important to our life.

[00:03:58] And the fact is that [00:04:00] we've been doing this for a long time. We started doing it while we were still in debt and struggling to get out of debt. We started doing it when we actually were having money problems ourselves, because we decided that putting this into our budget was something that was for us a prior.

[00:04:19] It was something that we felt called to do. And we felt that we were out of alignment because we were talking about giving and yet we weren't doing it. Now, this is money that we do above other giving. We have a regular tie that we do because that's something in our belief structure. We have other giving that we do as well.

[00:04:38] But this is above that this is something that we do just to spontaneously bless people that we just happen to run across. They're just into. Path, for example, we were traveling for Thanksgiving one time and we stopped at a Denny's and the people that are waiting tables at a restaurant on Thanksgiving day [00:05:00] are working there, cuz they need the money.

[00:05:02] And my wife is very empathic and she figured out that the waitress was frazzled. And so she stopped her and she asked her what was going on. And she told us the story about how she was driving into work that morning. And her van blew up and it was stuck on the side of the road and she wasn't sure how she was gonna fix it.

[00:05:18] But she was there working because she'd managed to get to work. And she was still thinking about her van and she apologized to us. We actually had travel money that we were going. that we had in cash and we ended up leaving a very significant tip for this waitress. Now I have no idea if it was enough money to fix her van or not, but I guarantee you it was money that she could use in that way.

[00:05:43] And I don't know what she did or didn't do with the money. None of that matters. It was just that we felt called on our hard it to go ahead and bless her in that way. And we never would've done that before. This was something that we started doing because we wanted those [00:06:00] opportunities not to be called out, by the way we left the tip and got out of the restaurant before she probably even found the money.

[00:06:07] So we made sure that it wasn't something we did to get thanks or praise that wasn't our motivation. It was just an opportunity to bless her. And when we got to where we needed to go, we went to the bank, it got some more money out and finished our own trip with extra money that we had. And we used that to do that.

[00:06:27] That event is what made us begin to say, Hey, we just need to plan this in our budget. We are going to be faced with opportunities like this, and we wanna be able to bless other people. So we just need to make sure that we've set aside money to do it. And we began to do that from that day forward and we continue.

[00:06:44] Till this day doing that because we've made sure that this is a priority that we intentionally want to find. And this is something that we're now looking for. It opened our eyes to the fact that we have the opportunity to bless others [00:07:00] in this way. And now we see those opportunities when they come up that of being blind to 'em.

[00:07:06] So maybe spontaneous giving. Isn't a thing that you wanna do, but there's probably something that you should be doing with your money and that you should be building that habit and that muscle in, and there's probably some form of giving that you should be doing that you're currently not. And if that's on your heart, I challenge you to build that into your budget.

[00:07:27] Build that into your plan and find the opportunity to do that. Giving intentionally starting now. Thanks for listening.

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