David C. Hughes, Writer

“For the LORD your God will bless you in all your harvest and in all the work of your hands, and your JOY will be complete." –Deuteronomy 16:15

Archive for the tag “Joy”

02 Apr 2014

The Epiphany of Joy, Chapter 12: Joy in Giving (1 of 3)

NOTE: On March 26th, the day I turned 50, I signed a publishing contract with Progressive Rising Phoenix Press for both The Epiphany of Joy and for Melted Clowns.  The timing couldn’t have been more perfect as Mary and I toasted this pivotal life event with not only Amanda Thrasher, co-owner of Progressive Rising Phoenix Press, but also with my parents, who were in town to help celebrate my milestone birthday.  Special thanks goes out to both Amanda and her business partner, Jannifer Powelson, for their trust and confidence in me.  You ladies rock!  We’re shooting for a September 20th release date for the two books, and my goal is to participate in the Writer’s Extravaganza, an author meet and greet and book signing held at the Barnes & Noble in the Parks Mall in Arlington, Texas, on 9/20.  More information to follow.

Thank you all for your continued support, prayers, and interest as we take the next step on this incredible journey.  Without you all, my life’s calling would be meaningless.  With you all, the world is truly blessed.

Many blessings,

David

And now, The Epiphany of Joy, Chapter 12: Joy in Giving, part 1 of 3 . . .

 

All you need do is recognize that you have the ability to allow God to work through you and bring happiness to others. And the more you give happiness to others, the more you will have it for yourself.

–Matthew Kelly, A Call to Joy, page 117

 

One evening, a couple months after I’d left my steady job, I started to feel the pinch of our severely-diminished family income while balancing the checkbook. The three-figure tally at the bottom of the check register did nothing to assure me I’d done the right thing giving up my full-time six-digit income in exchange for the adventure of a writer’s life. I scrutinized the debits–mainly birthday party expenses for Hannah–and felt my blood pressure rising.

A couple weeks earlier, Mary had sacrificed her own birthday and anniversary gifts in exchange for throwing Hannah a big sixth birthday party, and she’d busied herself buying candy for the piñata, purchasing gift bags for the party-goers, and putting down a deposit to hold the professional magician. On top of all that, we’d caved in to Hannah’s persistent nagging for guinea pigs and ended up spending even more money on a cage and all the trimmings. And I knew Mary hadn’t yet finished: she still had to buy an assortment of colored sand for one of the party activities.

For months Mary had been trying to convince Hannah to relinquish her obsession with the purple Fisher Price kitchen she’d played with since she was a toddler. She’d outgrown the thing by a year or two, but whenever we broached the subject of donating it to the church, she’d whine about still wanting to play with it. So there it sat in her bedroom, taking up space and collecting a fine patina of dust. But when we revealed the guinea piglets to her on her birthday, we seized the moment to coax her into giving away the toy: “We need to make a space to put the cage,” Mary told her. Mesmerized by the piglets, Hannah agreed.

The next morning Mary happily loaded the plastic kitchen into the back of the car and headed to the gym with Hannah. After dropping our daughter off, Mary then drove to the church office and unloaded the toy. She’d intended to head into Fort Worth to purchase the colored sand for the birthday party activity, but she ran out of time and returned to the gym to squeeze in a homeschool session with Hannah between training sessions.

While teaching first-grade addition, Mary offhandedly mentioned to the other homeschool moms that she hadn’t been able to buy the sand she needed. Her intention was to make the 30-minute trip into town the next day. Michelle Lockhart, Hannah’s gymnastics coach since she was 18 months old, stopped what she working on and looked at Mary. “What did you say?”

“I have to go to the Hobby Lobby in Fort Worth tomorrow,” Mary repeated, “to buy colored sand so the girls at Hannah’s party can fill dolphin key chains.”

“Hold on one second,” Michelle said. She dropped the paperwork she was organizing and called her husband, Heath. After chatting a minute, she hung up: “Heath will bring you a box of sand and dolphin key chains we just got from our church,” she said. “They were throwing them out so we took them and brought them home last night. He’ll drop them off today.”

In that moment everything clicked: Mary had given Hannah’s plastic kitchen to the church that morning, and a huge plastic bin filled with play sand and dolphin key chains arrived on our doorstep that afternoon. Jesus promised in Luke 6:38: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you” (Luke 6:38 NIV). That morning Mary had resolved to buy four different colored bags of play sand for about $10. She and Hannah then donated a toy worth not much of anything except to the hearts of the children who would now get to play with it. That afternoon our family received more than four dozen bottles filled with different-colored sand. We gave, and God poured about $140 worth of sand and key chains into our laps. In fact, we used only what we needed for the party and returned the rest of it. Thank You, Jesus!

I love to give! In fact, it’s one of my Spiritual gifts described by the apostle Paul in Romans 12:6-8. And the joy I receive from giving is truly worth the sacrifice of giving; the joy of giving is itself the reward. As Jesus promised, those who give with the right attitude will receive back what they gave, and more. Jesus’ allusion in Luke 6:38 refers to a basket filled with grain or flour which was first filled, compressed, shaken to settle it even further, then added to for good measure. A true abundance in return for a simple act.

Why do I give? First, I can’t help myself! Giving is my calling, even when it hurts–the reward, for me, is in the giving. But I admit I also give because of God’s promise to reward us in return. I have a heart of expectation, although what I receive may not be what I expected. God yells “Surprise!” to Mary and I a lot, and I’m completely convinced that because we faithfully and cheerfully donate our time, talents, and treasure, we’ve been blessed beyond blessed; God is glorified in our giving. The testimony alone is worth at least a few thousand denarii!

Mary and I also tithe, the Old Testament tradition of giving the first 10% of our income, our “first fruits,” to the church. We tithe to honor God, but we also tithe because, simply, it works as God promised. In Malachi 3:10, God threw down a challenge: test Him in this and watch what He does. Believe me, when you get your heart right, when you give cheerfully according to 2 Corinthians 9:7, when you drop dearth mentality, when you let go of pride, selfishness, and fear, tithing loses its potentially sour foretaste and produces the sweet fruit of God’s limitless abundance and “Praise Jesus” joy! You’ll end up wanting to encourage everyone to tithe as well!

(continued) 

Copyright ©2014 by David C. Hughes

Posted in The Epiphany of Joy and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
13 Mar 2014

The Epiphany of Joy, Chapter 11: Joy in Serving (1 of 3)

 

 

Once you experience the thrill of being God’s hands and feet to someone in need, you will look for more and more opportunities.  Your reward?  Indescribable joy. 

–Caroline Barnett, Willing to Walk on Water, “Chapter 1: Willing,” page 16

 

Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.

–Hebrews 13:2 NIV

 

I often traveled to Buffalo, New York, for my engineering job, and from November through April the work occasionally gave me the opportunity to re-experience one aspect of life growing up in the northeastern United States: cold and snowy weather.  And western New York in the winter can deliver some of the coldest and snowiest.

On this particular trip, the Delta Airlines MD-88 I flew in transitioned into the Buffalo-Niagara International airspace on a quiet February afternoon, with temperatures hovering around freezing.  In any given year the area gets about 94 inches of the white stuff, and during February the typical monthly total is a bit over 17 inches.  But this particular year the snowfall totals had been significantly lower.  So as the jet skimmed over the dairy farms and neatly-packed suburbs on approach to the airport, I noticed the area was not blanketed by snow as expected, but covered in the flat brownness of a worn-out winter.  Threads of discolored slush huddled in the shadows of the naked woods, and dirty piles of it stood hunched around the perimeters of parking lots.

That night the thin cloud deck drifted out, unveiling a crisp full moon and opening the stage for temperatures to fall below freezing.  The next morning when I peeked out the hotel window I saw the cars in the parking lot covered by a patina of crystalline frost.  Lucky for me, the rental car I drove came equipped with the one piece of standard equipment all cars in upstate New York need: an ice scraper.  Unfortunately, not all rental car companies ensure their customers leave the airport with this critical piece of hardware.  After I left the hotel and started the Ford Fusion, I began to attack the ice on the driver’s side window.  That’s when I noticed the car next to me was running, steam wafting out of the tail pipe, windshield wipers occasionally stuttering across the ice-covered windshield.  The driver, a young woman, tall and bundled in a long coat, swung open the door, rushed out of the car, and hustled into the hotel.

“Well, that ain’t gonna cut it,” I thought as I worked on skinning my Fusion of its coat of rime.  Obviously the young lady didn’t have a scraper, and I wondered if she had run back into the hotel to see if she could borrow one.  At that moment I determined I would scrape her windows when I finished mine.  I’m not going to pass this up, I thought.  What better opportunity to do a kind deed for someone?  So after I finished the Fusion, I started scraping off the windshield of the young woman’s car.  Suddenly the passenger side door opened and another young lady peered over the car roof.  “Thank you,” she beamed.  “Thank you so much!”

“No problem,” I replied, and kept scraping.  The first woman hustled back down the sidewalk from the hotel entrance, hands in the pockets of her long coat.

“Thank you,” she called as she climbed back into the driver’s seat.

“You’re welcome,” I answered.  “I saw your windshield wipers moving and I thought ‘That ain’t gonna cut it.’”  I worked my way around their car from driver’s side windshield, around the back, and finished on the passenger’s side windshield.  The passenger cracked her window to again express her appreciation as I finished up.  “Are you going to the airport, or going to work?” I asked.

“We’re going to take the bar exam,” the woman replied.

“Awesome!” I said.  “God bless.  You’re both going to do well!”  After saying goodbye, I climbed back into my car with a smile on my face, a light in my heart, and joy in my spirit.  That felt good!  Real good!  And as I pulled out of the parking lot and headed to work, I actually got choked up with joy: a kind deed, even something as simple as scraping ice off someone’s car windows, had made my day.  Literally.  I thought of the verse in the Bible where it says to be kind to strangers because, who knows, you may actually be serving angels (Hebrews 13:2).  To me, those two young ladies were angels because they unknowingly provided me an opportunity to serve, even in a seemingly insignificant way.

The rest of the day I was charged up–I worked with confidence and assertiveness, and with a clarity and alertness that lasted the whole shift.  Man, I thought, if doing a simple kind deed does this, I need to keep my eyes open for every opportunity I can find!  What a disproportionately huge reward for such a simple act.

Recently Fred Chapman, a fellow church member at New River Fellowship and an active volunteer for the Parker County, Texas, branch of Kids Against Hunger, invited volunteers to show up one late afternoon at the distribution facility on the west side of Weatherford.  The goal for the evening was to load two trailers with enough bags of food to provide over 100,000 meals for people in Mexico.  I jumped at the chance to bring Hannah, then five, to participate in this roll-up-your-sleeves service project.  She squealed with excitement and anticipation.

After we arrived at the distribution center that hot North Texas summer evening, I set Hannah to one side and told her to stand clear of the line of volunteers wheeling out pallets and passing box after box, bucket brigade style, from the pallets to the trailer. Each box contained a dozen bags of rice and soy mixed with vegetables, vitamins, and minerals.  Hannah never complained as she watched, despite the glaring sun and shimmering heat.  “Are we volunteering, Dad?” she asked.

“Yes we are, Sweetie,” I assured her, sweat dripping off my forehead.  “This is what we do.  We help each other.”

After we finished stacking boxes in the trailers, and the crew distributed the loads evenly over the axles, the volunteers hugged and said goodbye to the drivers as they started their long overnight journey to the border crossing into Mexico.  Fred then picked up Hannah and visited with her for a few minutes, holding her and talking to her eye-to-eye.  Hannah smiled and nodded, perfectly comfortable in the arms of this strong leader who still exudes continuous joy despite experiencing tragedy several years ago.  Knowing Fred, he poured as much encouragement and excitement into Hannah about serving as I had, most likely more.  I then collected my daughter and whisked her to off to get a dish of ice cream for a job well done.  “When can we volunteer again, Daddy?” she asked as we headed to Chik-fil-A.

“We’ll have lots of opportunities to do this again,” I assured her.

“Yay!” she cried.  Her joy in volunteering is just getting started, but for that day, her joy was complete.

 

(continued)

Copyright ©2014 by David C. Hughes

Posted in The Epiphany of Joy and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Post Navigation

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →