Almsgiving; Time, Talent, and Treasure

To continue on the three pillars of the Lenten season, this week I focus on the last one, Almsgiving!

Fasting and prayer are two things that are tied together because they can give strength to each other. Prayer helps us with the desire and ability to fast and the self-denial of fasting can help us and lead us to a better prayer life.

The third focus of Lent being almsgiving, which is something that can easily come out of a good prayer life and a time of fasting. I know many different people who take the money that they would have spent doing whatever they gave up and give it to a charity as another sacrifice. Almsgiving is not just something that we should do during Lent, it is something that we should be doing all year long. Often times the focus of almsgiving is just the monetary aspect of it, and it is an important part of it, because the parish still does need to pay the light bills and the mortgage payment of the facility. So, the treasure part of it is something that we need, but there are two other parts of it in time and talent.

Time is the offering of ourselves to the needs of something. We have many different volunteers that offer their time to help around here, from serving breakfasts, to helping in the school kitchen, to being a greeter or other things around here. Talent is giving of a specific thing that we are good at to the parish, in the past and still currently we have many people who give of their talents, from serving on committees and giving good insight to being a lector at Mass, to gardening, to many other things that help out around here. As one person, I am limited in my own talents and still have a need for others to continue to help out with their talents.

Each of us has something that we are passionate about and one of the great things in the Church, is that we have many opportunities to share our time, talent, and treasure in those things that we are passionate about. As a new and young parish, we are in need of all three parts of stewardship, volunteers of time and talent helping out with the many projects that we have going on, and treasure to be able to fund them. The word that we use in the Church is tithing, which comes from the word for a tenth. The Idea of giving a tenth of what we get comes from the Old Testament with the priest Melchizedek who is given a tenth of what Abraham has.

Within our parish, financially we are focusing on a couple of things, the first is finishing our capital campaign, the second is reducing our debt, and the third is to bring up our tithing or general donations to the working of the parish.

I pray that you will all have a continued blessed Lenten season that will lead us to the joys of the Easter Resurrection.

Fr. Ken Halbur