What charity is

When Robin and I were first married, we were dirt poor. I'm talking, our staple diet was plain rice, harvesting dandelions from the yard for greens, and meat only when hot dogs went on sale poor. Her parents helped, quite a lot actually...but every monetary gift came with strings attached, and heaps of guilt & judgement if we didn't behave exactly as her mother believed we ought. If we managed to scrape together a couple of dollars for entertainment, say for a movie, or an hour or two at an arcade, that bit of frivolity was worth a severe dressing-down if the secret got out. Because that sort of thing was not what dirt-poor, getting charity from your parents people, ought to be doing.

Fast-forward many years, to when we had children of our own, and income enough that we can afford to help someone out now and then. And we got a taste of how it feels to dig someone out of a tight spot, then later learn that they've spent money on something that we considered frivolous. It can be irritating. "Well," one thinks, "If they can afford to do that, then why did they need our help?"

But you see, unlike my mother-in-law, we remembered some important lessons from our lean times:

* People can't work 24x7. If you don't take some time to be a family, and treat yourselves, you're headed for some serious trauma.

* We don't see everything that's going on in someone else's life.

* A gift that is not given freely, out of love, is no gift at all.

So we learned to squelch the impulse to kibbitz by adopting this simple philosophy: "We gave this thing (money, food, books, clothing, etc.) away, because we wanted to help and we thought it was the right thing to do. This thing is not ours anymore, and we have no right to say what is done with it. We will not let it bother us if something is done with it that we wouldn't approve of."

This is what charity is.