I think of Marily and Gary Demarest. For years, the Demarests pastored in the Buffalo area and then at the La Canada Presbyterian Church. Gary is known as one of the founders of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and has served on many mission boards. Marily invested a significant part of her life in youth ministry and then with World Vision, as well as the two of them raising their three daughters. Many have seen the generosity of their spirit. But few know that, even with their own three daughters to educate, they saw the needs of a niece whose divorced parents really couldn’t raise her. They took her in as their own and, with great sacrifice in addition to educating their own children, paid her way through college. That’s generosity.

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And I think of our own Elaine and Fritz, who left this weekend for two months of medical mission in Kenya at Tenwek Hospital. They, along with others in our congregation, in a generosity of spirit, have used their professional expertise in generous servant ministry here and throughout the world.

And the list goes on.

The evidence is in: generosity works.

And the positive results of generosity are verified by secular studies.

I read an article in The Economist dated Oct. 14, 2006. It is titled “Altruism—The joy of giving.” This secular international magazine devotes a whole article to the impact the spirit of generosity makes upon the human brain. The lead paragraph reads:

Providing for relatives comes more naturally than reaching out to strangers. Nevertheless, it may be worth being kind to people outside the family as the favour might be reciprocated in future. But when it comes to anonymous benevolence, directed to causes that, unlike people, can give nothing in return, what could motivate a donor? The answer, according to neuroscience, is that it feels good.

Researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland, wanted to find the neural basis for unselfish generous acts. They actually studied the brains of 19 volunteers who were choosing whether to give money to charity or to keep it for themselves. They used a standard technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, which can map the activity of the various parts of the brain. The results were reported earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The conclusion was that the persons who elected to hold on to the money they were given and use it for themselves did not experience the joy that was present in the lives of those who, with generosity, clearly gave what they had in a “costly” way to charitable causes of their choice. Researchers were able to examine what went on inside each person’s brain as they made decisions based on moral beliefs. They found that the part of the brain that was active when a person donated happened to be the brain’s reward center, the “mesolimbic pathway” that is responsible for doling out the dopamine-mediated euphoria associated with sex, money, food and drugs. Thus the warm glow that accompanies charitable giving has a physiological basis.