1.  But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly.

   Matthew 6:3-4

   Years ago, when my husband was working on his doctorate, the Immigration Department told me I could not  continue my teaching career because of my  nationality.  What a shock that was to our financial plans!  My husband didn’t qualify  for Canadian student loans because he was studying out of the country, and he didn’t qualify for American loans  because he was Canadian.  My husband was allowed to work twenty hours a week on campus; we took out a second mortgage on our house; and we lived off credit cards.  But by the time we were entering the last year of Dave’s program, we were heavily in debt and questioning whether we could hold on much longer.

   One day we found a stamped letter with no return address on it in our mailbox.  I opened it to find  a typed Scripture passage and a one hundred dollar bill.   Every month of that last year, the same gift arrived in the mail.  The letter was never signed.  To this day  I have no idea who sent  those one hundred dollar bills.  God’s love was made tangible in our lives through someone’s generosity.  But our desire to give to others increased because of those gifts.

   Thought:  William Wordsworth is quoted as saying that the  “best portion of a good life”  is the  “little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love.”
   Jan Congo