The Gift of Time: the most Thoughtful Gift You Can Give
The purest sacrifice is time. You have no opportunity to make more time. Therefore, it is a precious gift. Giving time to a charitable cause will not get you a tax deduction that will let you deduct the time back from your form 1040A. Giving of your time, therefore, is the most truly generous gift you can give.
The joy of giving is your return on the investment of your time. At the end of June I will be riding my bicycle in a 175-mile fundraising event for the MS Society. For the event I am raising funds to help people living with MS and to fund research toward finding a cure. At the event I'll bike for two days and one hundred seventy-five miles from Quincy to Provincetown to help increase awareness of MS. As I do these things, I think of my friends who are living with Multiple Sclerosis, and how I am doing what I can to help. A person living with MS always speaks at dinner at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy the night after the first leg of the trip, thanking the cyclists for their efforts. All year I anticipate the wonderful feeling I get from this event.
Generally speaking, I find that the times I spend helping someone else or making my family's Jewish experience more satisfying are some of the most enjoyable and memorable times of my life, giving meaning to the phrase, ‘time well spent.'
