It’s hard to admit, but giving doesn’t come easily to me. It’s probably there somewhere in my genes, but I’m sure being the oldest of four growing up cemented it in pretty deep. If you didn’t take what you wanted, and take it first, you were going to get scraps. That is just Big Family Life.

In my own home now, with seven kids, I find myself using my large family as an excuse to continue Not Giving. I don’t want to feed the neighbor kids, because my own kids already eat continuously, and the neighbor kids already come over all the time. We would have to increase our food budget to feed a bunch of kids whose parents I’ve never even met. I’m not doing it.

With my friends and family, I want to be giving. But even that doesn’t often come naturally. I have to be intentional about it.

When it’s time to give spending money to the kids, I want them to earn it, even when there isn’t time or it’s not realistic. I have trouble sharing my special treats. When we first got married, I remember how I instinctively pulled my snack bowl away from the Chaplain when he reached over to grab a bite. I still have to fight that impulse. And I hate it when people Ruin My Stuff. Self Preservation Mode is hard to pull out of.

A few years ago, when my mom mentioned how much she loved my echinacea, I saw it as an opportunity to be generous.

Except, I only had one echinacea plant in my back yard that summer. 

I love gardening. But my most beautiful garden spaces have been the ones that thrive with neglect. I weed maybe three times a year, if that.  I water even less. I don’t have time. My kids regularly trample what plants I do have. So while I love echinacea, too, it wasn’t thriving in my yard that year and I was down to one plant.

But I wanted to be generous.

So I dug it up and brought it to my mom the next time I visited.

I felt a little heartbroken, but I knew it was the right thing to do.

Later that summer, something started to happen.

It began in the same place I’d pulled up my last remaining plant.

New, baby echinacea began to grow.

There wasn’t just one.

There were so many seedlings that I was able to dig them up and plant them all over my yard.

Now, if you came to my house in the summer knowing I’d given my last echinacea away, you’d never believe it, because it’s the most prolific flower in my garden.

God knows how I am. I can be stubborn, and thick-headed. But I can’t ignore a big fat object lesson every time I walk outside.

You could say that the plant I gave my mom had already seeded the ground without my knowing it before I dug it up. And sure, it probably did.

But never, before or since, have I experienced such an explosion of growth from one particular plant in one summer. My echinacea plants remain the one of the biggest features in my garden. I’ve tried to put in a number of other perennials, but none of them have survived and thrived the way those seedlings did.

Giving doesn’t come naturally to all of us. Sometimes we white-knuckle through it. Yet even reluctant givers can learn generosity. There’s not a guarantee of endless material blessing this side of heaven for being generous. But it certainly has its perks. For me, it was a Big God showing me what a small deal it is for him to take a handful of seeds from an absent plant and fill my yard with blooms.