Generous Tipping Experiment

I was at a restaurant in the Dallas airport the other day and left a $50 tip on a $20 meal.  Because I was traveling for business, I used my corporate credit card to pay for the meal. My assistant called me a few weeks later and asked me how she should treat the $50 tip.  She didn’t know about this project and I hadn’t really thought about how to expense that large of a tip.   So I ended up paying for the tip myself but I had a great opportunity to share the joy of generosity with my assistant. 

I was relating the story of my $50 tip for the $8 salad to my wife as we were driving the other day. As I talked about it excitedly, I noticed that she didn’t share my joy and asked her what was wrong. Her answer hit me hard. “You will give a stranger $50 but you make me feel guility when I buy the kids a new pair of shoes.”

Is this true? Am I generous to strangers while lacking generosity with my own family? I think I probably am. Why is this? As I thought about it, there are a couple of issues that drive this lack of personal family generosity.

1. I believe that the typical American family spends way too much on themselves with no regard for others. Statistics prove this and I don’t want to be the same way. We were blessed to be a blessing which means we should live simply so that others can simply live. I desire to be frugal on what we spend on ourselves so that we can be generous with others. Perhaps in my desire to live frugally I use guilt to manipulate my wife, who does most of the spending in our family. I feel awful about this.

2. I struggle with internal feelings of guilt about spending money on myself or my family in light of point #1. I know that from a global perspective, my family’s income is in the top 1% of all wage earners. Bono tells us that 50% of the world’s population lives on less than $2 per day. The $39 per month I spend for cable can support one full-time teacher to gypsy children in Pakistan. These truths produce a twisted sense of guilt when I believe I spend too much on my already rich family at the expense of the poor world.

Speaking to rich Christians in I Timothy 6: 17 - 19, Paul says that God provides us with everything for our enjoyment. He also instructs us in this same passage to do good, to be rich in good deeds, to be generous and willing to share. I think this passage really sums up my struggle - to enjoy the blessings God has provided me by being generous with my family while being rich in good deeds to those in the world who need it. It seems like this balance is elusive.