> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.takeonestepforward.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Living With Open Hands - URL: https://www.takeonestepforward.org/living-with-open-hands/ - Published: 2026-09-14T23:46:53.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T21:02:34.000Z - Description: Living generously isn't only about what we give. Sometimes faith means opening our hands to receive, trusting God with what we have, and recognizing that even in seasons of need, we still have something to offer. - Author: Christopher Lyman - Tags: Perspective, Christian Living ![audio-thumbnail](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d7/05/d705cbac-291e-4b77-9104-3d2608d56da8/content/media/2026/09/What-Giving---and-Receiving---Taught-Us-About-Generosity_thumb.png) What Givingand ReceivingTaught Us About Generosity 0:00 /786.7065 1× What Giving—and Receiving—Taught Us About Generosity There was a time when I thought I understood generosity. My wife and I have always been generous people—sometimes probably to a fault. We didn't need to have much before we were willing to share it. If a friend's family needed groceries, we wanted to help. If someone couldn't make rent and we had enough to step into the gap, we did. We weren't wealthy ourselves. Far from it. But if we had something and someone else needed it, sharing seemed natural. For a long time, that was my understanding of generosity: **someone has a need, you have something that can help, so you give.** It's a good definition. It just isn't a complete one. There came a point in our lives when generosity stopped being an idea we believed in and became a way of life we experienced from the other side. We found ourselves desperate, needing God to move in ways we didn't even know how to ask for. Suddenly, we weren't the people stepping into someone else's gap. **We were the gap.** And God began changing the way we understood generosity. ## A Church With Open Hands There is a beautiful picture of the early church in Acts. These were people learning what it meant to follow Jesus together. They worshiped together, ate together, prayed together, and shared what they had. Acts 4 describes them as being “one in heart and mind.” When needs arose within the community, people responded. Some even sold property and brought the proceeds to the apostles to be distributed. Then comes this remarkable description: > “There were no needy persons among them.” > — Acts 4:34 Following Jesus hadn't eliminated hardship. What had changed was the way the community responded to it. The believers began seeing their possessions differently. What they owned wasn't merely something to accumulate and protect; their resources could also become a means of caring for the people God had placed around them. Our world—and even much of the American church—is a long way from fully reflecting that picture. There are needs everywhere, from the enormous and complicated to the ones sitting a few rows away from us on Sunday morning. But Acts gives us a vision of Christian community in which people pay attention to one another. When one person has a need and another has the ability to help, generosity becomes one of the ways the body of Christ cares for itself. There are two people in that exchange: a giver and a receiver. **Both are blessed in the process.** ## Learning to Receive Giving can feel good. You see a need, you help, and you know that you played a small part in making someone's burden lighter. Receiving can feel very different because it requires us to admit something most of us would rather avoid: **I can't do this by myself.** Accepting generosity sometimes means allowing other people to see that we're struggling. It can require laying down our pride, independence, and desire to appear as though we have everything under control. But receiving is an important part of Christian community too. The person receiving has a need met. The giver gets the opportunity to obey God, experience the joy of serving someone else, and discover that what God placed in their hands can have a purpose beyond themselves. Sometimes they even become part of the answer to a prayer they never knew someone was praying. My wife and I would eventually learn just how difficult—and beautiful—that exchange could be. ## When We Became the Ones in Need Years ago, our oldest daughter, Cloe, suffered a heart attack, and our world changed. There are seasons when the normal categories that organize your life suddenly don't matter very much. Plans, schedules, routines, and financial goals get pushed aside because something far more important has taken their place. For us, it was keeping our daughter alive and caring for our family. That year, we made approximately **$17,000**. That wasn't even enough to cover our rent, much less food, utilities, transportation, medical expenses, and everything else required to keep a family going. There was no spreadsheet that made those numbers work. We had spent years being willing to help when friends needed groceries or couldn't make rent. Now we were the family who needed help. And people showed up. Through the generosity of others and the provision of Jesus, our needs were met. Not every want. Not some suddenly comfortable version of life. But somehow, in a year when the numbers simply didn't make sense, we made it through. People stepped into gaps we couldn't fill ourselves. God used the hands of other people to care for our family during one of the most desperate seasons of our lives. For years, I had understood generosity from the perspective of the person giving. Now I understood what it felt like to be on the other side. **Sometimes you're the gap someone else is being called to step into.** We had to learn to receive, and that wasn't always comfortable. But receiving allowed us to experience the body of Christ in a way we never had before. What could have remained someone else's money, time, food, or resources became God's provision in our lives because they were willing to share it. Generosity was becoming much bigger than giving something away. It was becoming a way of living together. ## Two Small Coins Jesus once sat near the temple treasury and watched people bringing their offerings. Many wealthy people gave large amounts. Then a poor widow approached and placed two very small coins into the offering. Financially, her gift barely registered beside the others. If generosity were measured only by the size of the contribution, she would have been easy to overlook. Jesus didn't overlook her. He called His disciples over and told them that she had given more than everyone else because the others had given from their abundance, while she had given from her poverty (Mark 12:41–44). **Jesus saw something the numbers couldn't measure. He saw her heart.** Her story challenges the idea that generosity begins once we finally have enough. It's easy to imagine ourselves becoming generous someday. When we make more money. When the kids are older. When life settles down. When the bills aren't so high. When our schedule opens up. There will probably always be a reason to wait. The widow brought what she had. Her two coins remind us that the measure of generosity isn't simply the amount leaving our hands. It is also the willingness of the heart holding it. ## God Doesn't Need Our Money There is another unusual story in Matthew 17 that has always fascinated me. Jesus and Peter are approached about paying the temple tax. Jesus tells Peter to go fishing and says the first fish he catches will have a coin in its mouth. Peter finds the coin, and it is enough to pay the tax for both of them. Of all the ways God could provide money, apparently **fish banking was an option.** It's a small story, but it reveals something important about provision. God's ability to accomplish His purposes isn't limited by what is sitting in our bank accounts. **God doesn't need our money.** Everything already belongs to Him. Yet throughout Scripture, He repeatedly chooses to involve people in His work. He gives us opportunities to provide, serve, encourage, teach, build, feed, welcome, comfort, and care for one another. Generosity isn't God recruiting us to finance something He couldn't accomplish without us. It's an invitation to participate in what He is doing. That participation teaches obedience, loosens our attachment to things that can quietly become sources of security, and turns our attention outward. God can provide in ways we could never imagine. Sometimes He chooses to do it through a coin in a fish. Sometimes He chooses to do it through us. ## More Than Money Money is probably the first thing we think about when we hear the word *generosity*, but money is only one thing we possess. We have time, homes, vehicles, abilities, experiences, relationships, and knowledge. As followers of Jesus, we've also been given spiritual gifts intended to strengthen other people. Romans 12 speaks of serving, teaching, encouraging, giving, leading, and showing mercy. First Corinthians 12 describes the church as a body made up of different parts, each contributing something the others need. Generosity can look like paying for someone's groceries, but it can also look like having a truck and helping someone move. It can be cooking a meal, watching someone's children while they're at the hospital, fixing a car, opening your home, sharing something you've learned, or sitting beside someone who shouldn't have to sit alone. Maybe you don't have much money, but you have an afternoon. Maybe you've walked through grief and can recognize it in someone else's eyes. Maybe you know how to do something that someone else desperately needs help doing. We can spend so much time thinking about what we don't have that we overlook what God has already entrusted to us. That raises a much better question than simply, *How much can I afford to give?* **What has God placed in my hands?** ## Hospital Ministry We saw this during another difficult season with Cloe. Her heart was failing, and she had been medevac'd by helicopter to Stanford. At one point, we couldn't stay in her room, so Laura and I found ourselves in a sleep lounge for parents and caregivers. It was a community room, and inside was a young woman who was completely alone. Her newborn was in emergency surgery. The baby's father wasn't in the picture, and because of choices she had made in her life, her family wasn't available to her either. She was at the bottom, and she was hurting. The strange thing was, so were we. Our daughter had just been flown by helicopter to Stanford because her heart was failing. We didn't know what was going to happen. We weren't sitting in that room because life was going particularly well for us. But we had something she didn't have. **We had the hope of Jesus.** We talked with her and asked if we could pray for her. We bought her dinner, and I gave her the money I had with me so she could take care of some basic needs. It wasn't much, but it was what we had. I didn't need to figure out whether the choices that brought her to that room made her deserving of help. I didn't need to worry about what she would do with the money after I handed it to her. There was a hurting young mother sitting in front of us whose baby was in emergency surgery. In that moment, the only thing that mattered was showing her the love of Christ. Laura and I eventually began calling moments like that **hospital ministry**. We weren't walking through the hospital looking for ministry opportunities. We were parents carrying our own fear and pain. But somewhere along the way, God had taught us to notice the people around us even when our own circumstances were difficult. That young woman taught me another lesson about generosity: **Being in need doesn't mean you have nothing to give.** We couldn't fix her circumstances. We couldn't change what was happening to her baby. We couldn't even fix what was happening with our own daughter. But we could pray, buy dinner, share what we had, and make sure that, for at least that moment, she wasn't alone. That's what generosity looked like that night. ## What Are You Holding? Jesus said: > “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” > — Matthew 6:21 The things we possess have a strange ability to begin possessing us. Money can do that, but so can our time, house, plans, possessions, comfort, and even our abilities. Something can begin as a blessing from God and slowly become something we're terrified to lose. Imagine holding something valuable in your hand. If you're afraid someone might take it, your instinct is to close your fingers around it. The more afraid you become of losing it, the tighter you squeeze. Eventually, you've made a fist. We can do the same thing with the things God has entrusted to us. Living generously helps open the hand again. It reminds us that we are stewards of what God has given us and that our security ultimately rests in Him. An open hand can enjoy God's provision without worshiping it, hold plans loosely enough to be interrupted, and hold resources loosely enough to be shared. And an open hand can do something else. **It can receive.** ## Start With What's in Your Hands So where do we begin? Not with what we hope to have someday. Start with what's already in your hands. Look at the people God has placed around you and pay attention. Maybe the opportunity is financial. Maybe it's practical. Maybe someone simply needs your time, encouragement, knowledge, or presence. Ask God: **What have You placed in my hands that could bless someone else?** Then be willing to act when He brings someone across your path. If you're currently on the other side—if you're the one who can't make the numbers work, sitting in the hospital, struggling to keep your family together, or praying for provision you cannot create yourself—your next step may require a different kind of courage. Allow someone to help. Let them bring the meal, help with the bill, watch the kids, or sit beside you. Receiving someone's generosity gives them the opportunity to use what God has placed in *their* hands. There have been seasons when our family has given, and there have been seasons when we have received. Both have shaped the way I understand generosity. I no longer see it primarily as an amount of money. **I see it as a posture.** It's recognizing that what God has entrusted to us can be used for purposes beyond ourselves. It's noticing people, responding when we can, and allowing others to respond when we're the ones in need. It's learning to hold God's blessings without allowing those blessings to become our gods. Maybe that's why the image of an open hand means so much to me. An open hand is ready to give, and it's ready to receive. The widow had two coins. Peter found a coin in a fish. The early church shared what it had. Our family received generosity when we couldn't make the numbers work, and later, in a hospital lounge while our own daughter was fighting for her life, we discovered that we still had something to give. Different circumstances. Same posture. **Open hands.** We don't have to wait until we have more money, more time, or a more comfortable life to live generously. We can begin with whatever God has already placed in front of us. Because **it's hard to catch the blessings of the Lord with clenched fists.** Maybe today, your **one step forward** is simply opening yours. --- ### Take Your Next Step Looking for more encouragement as you grow in your faith? 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