I have urged you all to begin preparations that would enable you to love others in economic hard times, but this has not been intended to urge you to become selfish today for the sake of the possibility of loving someone tomorrow. The very best preparation for loving someone tomorrow is loving someone today. If we become tight-fisted now so that we might be open-handed tomorrow, there is something going on in our hearts that we need to learn more about.
An important part of loving others is anticipation and balance. We don’t want to become like a mom who obtains the food for a great feast tomorrow, and then when she comes to prepare the meal, discovers that the members of her family—like the locusts in the prophet Joel—have devoured it all. At the same time, we don’t want to become like a mom who fills the fridge so that her family can eat, and who then spends a great deal of time shooing them away from the fridge. Anticipation and balance go together.
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All true preparation for any kind of future trial consists at the center in becoming a certain kind of person. We do not know the timing or magnitude of this trial that we think we anticipate, but we should prefer entering into such a time as the right kind of person with five dollars than the wrong kind of person with five hundred thousand.
You know you are becoming the right kind of person if you are practicing how you will share then in how you are sharing now.