Today’s story is about Mark, an 37-year-old engineer who just invented a radically innovative widget that will improve cell phone battery life by eleventy-hundred percent. For some entirely aethetic reason this widget is incompatible with the iPhone, but Apple just bought the rights to the tech anyway so nobody would have have it.
But Apple’s jerkwadness is not the point of this story. The point of this story is that Mark just made eleventy jillion dollars and has decided two things. (1), he’s going to take the rest of his career off; and (b) he’s gonna give a ton of money to his Many Waters United Church. That might seem strange to a lot of people, as Mark wavers between being agnosticism and atheism, but to Mark it makes perfect sense. Without Many Waters’ pastor and congregation, he believes that he’d have died about half a decade back. It was five years ago, you see, that Mark was at the lowest point of his life. His wife and children had died in a car accident, you see, and Mark was the one driving. The fact that the police and insurance company decided he wasn’t at fault did nothing to alleviate his guilt, let alone his despair. He was quite liteerally one the verge of suicide – we’re talking standing on a skyscraper roof and about to jump – when he met Anne, MW’s pastor. She talked him down, got him into (secular) counseling, and invited him to her church. When Mark protested that he didn’t believe in God, Anne replied that Many Waters wasn’t going to try to convert him–just help him.
Which they did. The MW congregation was warm and accepting, and moreover were clearly a force for good in their community: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, helping the hopeless. Mark felt loved and accepted by them, and they helped him forgive himself for living when his family had died.
Which brings us back to the present. Mark, as I said, is newly filthy rich, and intends to give a jillion smackers out of his eleventy-jillion dollar fortune to Many Waters. Going to Anne to discuss the best way to do that, he is surprised when she ever-so-slightly discourages him from making such a huge gift all at once. “Of course I don’t want to discourage your giving back,” she says, “and of course we can use the money. But I’m a little worried too. Many Waters’ ability to help comes in large part from being a community. It seems to me that, if you give us that big a gift all at once – it would fund our operating expenses and every charitable ministry for years! – that no one else would feel the need to tithe. And in that case we’d lose the sweat equity. When the congregation has to work together to pay for the food pantry, to contribute to Heifer International – it brings us together in a way your big gift might prevent. I’m not going to tell you how to how to spend your money, but it might be better to spread it among multiple charities, or if you must give it all to Many Waters, to do a fraction of that every year rather than all at once.”
Does Anne have a point, or should Mark go with his original plan?
), I will give a big gift to First Congregational Church in Memphis. But I wouldn’t want them dependent on me, because that would change the nature of the gift from being about their good works to being about my ego, and that’s already too big. At most I’d start a scholarship in my deceased son’s name, but otherwise the gifts would be as discreet as possible.