Review: Live Generously
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 2, 2014
C. J. Hitz has compiled, in 21 Stories of Generosity: Real Stories to Inspire a Full Life (A Life of Generosity)(Volume 2), stories of people who have been the recipients and those who have been the bearers of generosity and the amazing results of those acts.  These acts come in many forms.For Darlene Shortridge,  it is watching her daughter’s giving of her only Barbie doll to a stranger become a huge box “filled to the top with Barbie dolls, clothes,  … furniture and so much more.”For Carol Freed,  a lifetime of generosity started when a retired couple who invited her to be a part of their Christmas Eve and Christmas morning when she was far away from home, a simple act of caring.Carol Round’s learned a lesson about judging others when she, in an act of impatience, paid for someone else’s ice cream.For Graham Roberts, half–a-world away, from the realization of the self-sacrificial act of Jesus on a cross another half-a-world away learned when fighting demons of despair “a bruised reed He will not break.”Through all the gifts, all the lives, all he stories, run the thread established early on in the scriptures. In Genesis 18, God decides Abraham will be the father of a strong nation through whom all nations would be blessed. According to Eugene Peterson in The Message says God “settled on him as the one to train his children and future family to observe God’s way of life, [to] live kindly and generously and fairly.”C. J. Hitz has compiled twenty-one stories that reveal, in words, thoughts, acts of random- and not-so-random kindness that individual lives and the world can be changed for the better. As Hitz says, they are ”unique snapshots of God’s generosity as He uses people.”By the end of the first story, each reader will be searching out ways to be a blessing, a “powerful tool in the hands of God,” inspired to become their own stories of inspiration by living lives of kindness, fairness, and generosity in giving of their time, money, attention, service, and words of blessing.