Identify With the Needs of Others
Many charities act as go-betweens. A person with resources to give but with no
knowledge of someone in need might work through a charitable organization. Such
Organizations serve as intermediaries between providers and recipients. They
pool resources to know where the needs are and how to meet them.
Giving through a go-between is worthy and generous. Ideally, though, generosity
involves a donor who has direct contact with the recipients and know of their
specific plight.
Generosity is not just writing a check in isolation from the one in
need. Generosity is identifying a need and giving something of your own heart
and hands. To the extent that many charitable organizations endeavor to
facilitate this donor/recipient link, the ideal of generosity is upheld.
One individual who understood how to identify a need and meet it was Margaret
Gaffney Haughery. She had a special capacity to understand the plight of the
orphans and the impoverished she helped.
Margaret’s parents, Charles and Margaret Gaffney, were Irish immigrants. They
died not long after their arrival in the United States, leaving Margaret an
orphan at age 8.
Taken in by a couple who had sailed on the same ship with her parents,
Margaret was raised in poverty. At 21, she married Charles Haughery. They had a
baby girl – but within a year, both father and daughter had died. Having lost
her parents, her husband, and her child, Margaret thus found herself living in
poverty in New Orleans by the age of 23.
Such a catastrophic youth is certain to deeply impact any person’s character.
Rather than emerge from such a background neutral, Margaret realized she had a
choice: either grow bitter and resentful or develop special sensitivity.
Margaret learned the latter – not solely by her own pluck – but nonetheless, she
learned to give to others because of her own experience rather than hoarding to
herself in compensation for her many losses.
Understanding the plight of the poor and those deprived of family, she
ministered to their needs with far more than sterile checks or handouts. She
gave with a heart of compassion.
Your background – or your present situation – is likely very different from
Margaret’s. Yet it may not be all that different in at least this way: your own
difficulties compel you to develop either a greater compassion for the
difficulties of other or a greater urge to hoard to try to fill your own losses.
The character quality of generosity demonstrates a willingness to identify with
the suffering of theirs. It is a willingness to become acquainted with the
hardships of those in need – needs like your own or perhaps very different.
Generosity is more than giving out of your abundance to someone in need. It is
identifying the need and carrying the burden of the hardship on your own
shoulders.
Identify on the Job
So many character qualities depend upon building relationships. Generosity is
one of them.
Giving from a distance is a commendable step of self-sacrifice. But the ideal of
generosity is borne out of a heart that understands the plight of the one(s)
personal experiences or by friendship with them, is fundamental to compassionate
generosity.
Get to know – really get to know- the people in your world. Be sensitive to
their pressures and, with genuine concern, seek opportunities to meet their
needs personally and directly.
Character definitions and information used by permission. Copyright
Character Training Institute. www.characterfirst.com
