Generous Tipping Experiment

I was eating dinner with a group last night and mentioned my experiment in generous tipping.  One of my dinner companions said that as a Christian it embarrassed him to see people in a restaurant leave a .50 cent tip and a evangelistic tract on a table after dinner.  I wonder if Christians really do this?  If so, how delusional to think that you can be stingy with your giving and expect people to be drawn to your God.  I wonder if these folks realize how generous their God is?    Look at Jesus.  I heard today that in his first miracle, turning water into wine, Jesus produced enough wine to serve 3,600 16 oz glasses of wine for the dinner guests….a generous wine miracle by a generous Savior!  I often thought a great way for the Christian to share his faith is to leave an extravangent tip in a restaurant with a note for the server saying, “This is a small act of generosity compared to the extravagent love of God who made you and gave Himself for you.”  Now that to me would be a powerful witness to God’s grace  for all people.  Or it could be just a good way to buy people’s attention to hear the truth of God’s love.  Would it be worth it? 

My wife waited tables in college at a chain restaurant in Louisiana. She told me that hated it when church groups came in after a service because they were large, demanded a lot of attention and very rarerly tipped well.A friend of mine from Southern California heard about my generous tipping and decided to ask a local restaurant owner near his church how Christians tipped. The owner said that the waitresses commented that if people prayed before their meal, then it was a good sign that the tips were going to be small.I wonder if this is the reputation we Christians get in our desire to be “good stewards” of God’s money? Does good stewardship mean being cheap? I wonder if Jesus would view this as good stewardship in light of the truth that “though He was rich, yet for our sake He became poor, so that we through His poverty might become rich?”Let’s follow Jesus model….we might not have to become poor but we can sure make others rich for a moment through our generosity.