“After the wise men had gone, an angel from the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up! Hurry and take the child and his mother to Egypt! Stay there until I tell you to return, because Herod is looking for the child and wants to kill him.’” Matthew 2:13, The Poverty and Justice Bible
What do you plan to give God this year?
How about the gift of understanding and the gift of prayer. Could anything be more important this year when mass immigrations around the world emphasize the growing problem of inequality?
One of the first lessons I learned from a Faith and Money workshop was the importance of “praying the newspaper.” Reading helps us understand the root causes of immigration. Taking the problems you read about to God in prayer opens your heart and mind to ways you can do something towards the solving of a problem that is far too big for any of us to solve ourselves. It is a global problem that is even too big for any one nation to solve by itself. Think of your understanding and your prayers as “One small step for mankind.” 
What do you plan to give God this year?
How about the gift of your time and the gift of money. In the book Uncommon Gratitude, Sister Joan Chittister says, “A good day is a day with enough to eat and a place to sleep for everyone in the family. A bad day is a day without what life requires to keep us sane, to keep us warm, to keep us from going to bed hungry.”
Prayer is an important step toward involvement, toward finding a way that we as individuals can help. For some of us that way will be giving God the gift of our time working with immigrant groups here and abroad, but for most of us that will be giving God a gift from our financial resources. Your reading should help you find a way to do that.
Life has a way of clouding our thinking more often than we realize. We make excuses for why we don’t give God our time, why we are unwilling to use the gift of our abilities to take what critical steps we can for mankind, why we convince ourselves we don’t have enough money to give God the gift of our dollars. It is far too easy to put those steps off and convince ourselves we’ll give God those gifts someday.
My calendar doesn’t have anything on it labeled “Someday.” Does yours?
Blessings on your efforts to give gifts to God today,
Judy Osgood