Good Gifts

             If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13)

 

            At some point, I decided that a gift wasn’t a gift if it was something you needed, because if you needed it, you would get it or it would be given to  you aside from the occasion on which you were “owed” a gift. Giving someone a new vacuum or underwear just wasn’t giving a gift. I’ve realized that my thinking on the subject isn’t entirely accurate or good. It’s born of a level of prosperity that I imagined we had when I was growing up. Now, I might be quite happy to receive a vacuum cleaner, if it fit into my lifestyle – meaning I want something easy to store, but that will allow me to use it while standing. I suspect I’m not the only “spoiled” kid who has ideas about what is or isn’t a gift.

            One of my ancestors put it in his will that his children could only inherit from his estate if they had put off getting married until a specific age. The idea was that they were to work for that inheritance on the family farm until that age. Inheritance wasn’t a gift. It has to be earned. I’ve learned that this was not an uncommon idea at the time. Ideas about gifts change. Prior to today’s passage, Jesus asked how many of those present, if their children asked for something to eat, would give them a stone or a scorpion.

            He then calls the food a “good gift.” It’s not something they were due, or that they’d earned. People scorn the “patriarchal” social system of the day, but that’s not really the point here. The point is that the people listening were willing to give their children what they needed, the Father is even more willing to give us the Holy Spirit, Whom we need as desperately as we need food.

            The problem is that we don’t tend to really want the Holy Spirit. Oh, if He’s going to be a Knight in Shining Armor – or a cleaning and landscaping crew – come to fix things up and then leave, that would be acceptable. Or, if He grants power, influence, fame, fortune, or some other gift that makes us and others say, “Wow!” that’d be good. But the gift of the Holy Spirit who comes along and quashes our fun or suggests that we humble ourselves or do a better job of loving our neighbors? Well… we’re not so sure we want that gift.  

            And yet, just as the gift of a vacuum cleaner might find far more use than a gift we want, the gift of the Holy Spirit will do us far more good than power, influence, fame, fortune, or some other gift that makes us and other say, “Wow!” If we ask, and accept what He wishes to give us.