Gratitude Journal - Giving

One thing I was happy to be grateful for is my husband and his generous heart which I made sure to tell him thusly:
I told him: One of the things I love about you is that when you have "extra" money, [we'll call it that for lack of a better term] you are quick to share it with others who may need it more than you. For me that is more of a challenge, maybe because I pay the bills, maybe because it is in my nature to want to save for a rainy day - all the while hoping that day never comes or that I will recognize it and actually be willing to let go of the hard-earned nest egg.

We as a couple have always been willing to share our home with our friends and family. For example: in the first year of our marriage, we had guests sleeping on our couch for various periods of time...My friend from the WUJS program who crashed with us for about a month, my cousin who came to visit with an open-ended ticket, but found a job and a place to live rather quickly on his own (once I pointed him in the right direction), one of Eran's childhood friends who needed a place to go to get away from his nasty divorce and to get started in his new life.
These were the good times. When we needed help, we were also quick to lean on our family and friends for the same.

Recently we went to a family function where a new, young mother is struggling to care for her newborn and to look for a job. She is also looking for direction at this point in her life. My husband came into some money unexpectedly and without a second thought gave her a generous portion - not as a loan to be repaid, but as a gift to help her out immediately. Can't we all use a little extra "folding money" as my grandma used to call it?

Also, another childhood friend of his was recently willing to leave his life and children behind and give the American dream a shot. He was very spontaneous about the whole thing and did not do the proper planning and prep that would normally accompany such a drastic thing. He did call once he was in California and we pointed him in the direction of the nearest Chabad so that he would at least be able to get a Shabbat dinner and a place to stay. He never called us from Israel about these plans, had he done so we might have been able to help him from this end - a place to stay, job, etc. He pretty much set himself up for failure - answered an ad in a newpaper in Israel and got on a plane with the Israeli attitude of "yiheh beseder" - it'll be ok. He then told us the sob story that he was here with basically the shirt on his back and not much else, so we eventually FedExed him some cash - which we all know we'll never see again.

Eran's answer to me when I reminded him of these things as an example of his generosity was that he didn't expect to see the money he "loaned" to his friend or the young mother, but he came into virtually the same amount unexpectedly so it was meant to be...for him to have the money in order to share it with those who needed it more than him at that time.

Another small example of the power of tzedakah - when I sent a donation to a fund for a friend who had just had a baby and then fell seriously ill, I accompanyed the check [which was 3 times the amount I expected/meant to give - when I sat down to write the check, it's just what came out] with a note about the mitzvot that some of us had been doing in merit of a full recovery. The day the check posted to my account, coincidentally, was the joyful day that her husband was able to report that they had taken her completly off all respirators - that she was conscious and breathing on her own and that he was grateful to see her smile return to her face.

For me there are always tangible and poignant signs of the goodness of Hashem - and I don't have to look very hard to find them. They pretty much bash me over the head and say "appreciate me!"