Small giving.

A few weeks ago I went on a rant about giving and charity and handouts. Well, a week or so after I wrote that post I was downtown at a shoe store where a friend from my church works. It was a part of the epic boot quest of 2012 (or something) and I was just perusing my options and figured I'd say hello while I was at it. While there the very same deaf guy that had come into the office approached my friend and asked her for some money. The thing was, she knew him. He'd been coming in for a while and when she had the money, she'd loan him five or ten dollars. She said he always paid her back, too.

As it turns out, she didn't have anything on her to give him that day, but he eventually understood and left. That was it. She told me that the first time he asked she knew she was taking a chance, but figured it couldn't hurt.

It's funny how we can pass judgment, of varying degrees, on people and be totally and completely wrong. I'm not saying that what she did is what everyone should do, but the fact that she was willing to give to him says so much about her as a person. She doesn't care and she's not judging him. It adds a whole other layer to the question of whether we should give to people or not, doesn't it?

I still don't appreciate being asked for money in my place of work, or constantly asked for change by the man standing outside the grocery store, but it adds another layer to the problem. So today when I went to buy cream and the same guy that's been standing there for a year asked me if they were selling poppies inside, I bought him one. He didn't ask me to, and when I came out with it he was counting his change to get one himself.

I know it's not a big thing, but sometimes you have to give what you're comfortable with, whether it's a ten dollar loan or a one dollar poppy.