LEVERAGE
STUDY GUIDE
SESSION 5
How Much Are We to Give?
Finding the Finish Line
SESSION 5 VIDEOS
Session 5 Trailer (1:39 min)
Full Session 5 (29:20 min)
SESSION SAMPLE
ENDORSEMENTS
TESTIMONIES
Evan Longstreth, Managing Director, Eastern Division, Blue Trust
Evan shares his journey from high school to becoming a financial advisor, focusing on the power of generosity. He discusses his mission to help clients unpack their financial plans and increase their giving through donor-advised funds. Highlighting a success story, Evan demonstrates the positive impact of generosity, while emphasizing the importance of teaching others about giving and the training provided by his firm.
Erik Daniels shares his life story, beginning with his upbringing in a large Catholic family and his transformative travels in Europe during college. His conversion to Christianity profoundly shaped his life and career choices, leading him to join Blue Trust. Erik reflects on the challenges of financial security and emphasizes the importance of giving. He advocates for serving clients with purpose, passion, and generosity.
LEVERAGE TIPS
Experiencing God’s Provision: A Personal Journey
Personal journey of experiencing God’s provision during a financially challenging time in grad school. Despite hardships, they chose to give and witnessed blessings. They use their experiences to inspire others in church activities, emphasizing God’s faithfulness and the benefits of giving. Their life story serves as a testament to God’s provision, with a desire to pass this message to future generations.
READ STORIES OF GENEROSITY
Steve & Linda
“What happens when a couple draws a line in the sand and commits to giving beyond their wildest expectations?”
During David’s medical school training, he had the opportunity to work in a free clinic in inner-city Indianapolis. One day, after treating and releasing a young patient at the clinic, the child’s father came to him and gave him what he had to give . . . a stick of chewing gum. “I was just so humbled — here we are giving medical care to people who can’t afford to pay and could otherwise not receive care and this man offered me a stick of his gum. It was a huge act of generosity. I think about it to this day. He will never know how many people were impacted by his act of generosity to me.” A true, pay-it-forward moment began. And then disaster struck — literally.
David had always been attracted to the work of World Medical Mission, the medical arm of Samaritan’s Purse, which offered three-week volunteer trips throughout the world. But the organization wasn’t seeking emergency and trauma physicians, David’s specialty, until 1999, when he saw in their newsletter a specific request for professionals in emergency medicine. “I picked up the phone and called them. About six weeks later, I got off a plane in Macedonia and headed to the city of Gjakova, Kosovo, which had come under heavy bombing by NATO forces. True atrocities against humans were going on — the results were thousands of refugees and internally displaced people who had nothing. We went to what was left of the old town — it was still smoldering from an attack. Needless to say, I had never worked in a war zone. But now I had to get an emergency room up and running in one, despite the fact there was only very sporadic electricity and precious few supplies. We even had to use batteries to run monitors and other medical equipment. I saw injuries I’d never seen before, such as those from landmines. It was truly an eye-opening experience.”
After his return to the U.S., David made plans for a visit to Ethiopia on a six-month sabbatical from his position as vice president of medical affairs. That was when God began whispering to him that it might be time for a change from his current position. Very shortly after, he was working full-time for Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian international relief organization. “That was what God told me I needed to be doing — and I knew He was right,” says David.
David’s most challenging experiences were in Haiti and South Sudan. The relief teams were urgently called to Haiti due to a devastating earthquake and were met with enormous human casualties and a seriously damaged infrastructure. In South Sudan during their civil war, David recalls, “We could see the flash and hear the booms. They flew us out the next day. Those are the kinds of situations where we had to cover the people in prayer, because there was little more we could offer them than to show the love of God. In Kosovo, I learned you have to hit your knees before you hit the wall, because you cannot do this by yourself. I found out how truly dependent on God you have to be.”
In Bam, Iran, a stuffed teddy bear made the difference that medical care couldn’t after a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in December 2003, which killed more than 30,000 people. “So many people had nothing,” says David. “We were, of course, a Christian aid group working among a group of Muslims. One father took me to his daughter, who had a very serious spinal injury. There was little we could do other than get her name and location and turn the information into a central coordinating center, but we did give her a teddy bear. The girl’s mother and other women began crying, but not because we couldn’t help her. Her father told us, ‘It is because you gave her a teddy bear.’ We were able to show compassion, which meant a lot to them.”
During the past 10 years, David has, in his words, “been truly blessed to go to the largest international disasters,” both natural and man-made ones: the tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, the refugee crisis in civil war-torn South Sudan, the war in Iraq, an earthquake in Haiti, and most recently the earthquake in Ecuador. “When we go in, we start working immediately. We don’t go in to do an assessment, come back, and say ‘Here’s what needs to be done.’ We’re doing it — right then.”
Karan Gettle experienced God’s hand in a different way than her husband. Not allowed to accompany him on his numerous international medical trips because of the level of danger, and with absences of four to eight weeks, she stayed home — worried, of course, but “I always had peace beyond understanding. I never questioned that he was going where he was supposed to be. We never had a moment of hesitation that he should go. And, I’ve always had plenty of prayer
warriors who have been here for me. They pray for his safety, for the activities of the team, and for the people he’s serving. It’s a ‘front line’ of a different kind. We’re thrilled with how these decades of David’s work in crisis areas have changed us both. It has made us so dependent on the Lord.”
The Gettles note that you don’t have to fly halfway around the world to help others in need. The couple works with an inner-city organization in Indianapolis, gathering in a parking lot on Sunday afternoons distributing food and clothing to families, playing with kids or taking them trick-or-treating. “Whatever you can do to help people in crisis or transition — well, all I can say is you’ll receive blessings that you wouldn’t have imagined. I’m reminded of that every time I think of that stick of chewing gum from many years ago,” says David.
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Monya & David Giles
“How can a couple give away more than they ever imagined and still find themselves blessed beyond measure?”
“It has been a journey we never imagined. I grew up on a farm with holes in my blue jeans. I never saw myself ‘here.’ We have a nice old house and a nice little yard and a woodworking shop. That’s really all we need.”
The journey that David Giles describes is one that has taken him and his wife, Monya, from a young married couple with the typical struggles of career, finances, and raising kids to a place where they have literally given it all away.
As a 30-year-old, David started as a manufacturers’ representative in Houston, Texas, selling combustion equipment. With that first company, he experienced unexpected success. “As an independent sales rep, you can do pretty well,” says
David. “After a while, though, the business was making more money than I had ever imagined. That’s when we got connected to Crown Financial Ministries and began living our lives by their principles, one of which is God owns it all, and we are only stewards of God’s possessions. We began donating to multiple causes and more money seemed to just keep coming in.”
Says Monya, “We weren’t able — then or later — to out give God. It didn’t matter how much we gave away, He just kept pouring more in to us.”
After years in Houston, David and Monya moved north of Austin, where David started a company, making equipment for the oil industry. “I thought of it as a retirement hobby,” says David. “But it really took off — my hobby ended up being more successful than anything else I’d done. I was praying that God would actually unload this successful hobby by sending me a partner. He did, and I turned my attention to the next thing.”
David and Monya had been long-time clients of the National Christian Foundation (NCF), a non-profit group that helps generous givers simplify their giving, multiply their impact, and experience the joy of sending more to their favorite causes than they ever dreamed possible. The organization’s mission is to mobilize resources by inspiring biblically-based generosity. With the daily burden of running an unexpectedly successful “hobby business” off David’s shoulders, the couple changed their giving strategy. Rather than income coming to them and them giving it to NCF after they paid taxes, they contacted NCF to set up a donor advised fund. To fund the new giving strategy, David gave 40% of his company’s ongoing revenue to the NCF fund; 50% of the company went to his partner.
“Not only does the income bypass us, it allowed us to name our two daughters, two sons-in-law, and our son as the board of directors for the fund,” says David. “They are responsible for researching the causes we want to fund and finding causes they believe in and want to fund themselves. Our children have taken responsibility for this, and with a true passion. Not only do they provide direction for our NCF funds, but they have taken on their own personal charitable giving.”
One of the causes David and Monya consider very dear to them is Relief Network Ministries, founded in 2001 in League City, Texas, with a mission to help end the water crisis in Nigeria. The organization’s over-arching goal is to significantly
reduce the cycle of poverty and disease attributable to the water crisis. It focuses on ways to alleviate the adverse consequences of poverty and illiteracy, such as poor hygienic standards and inadequate skills for gainful employment. Relief Network Ministries’ motto is “Water 4 Life in Jesus’ Name.” David and Monya got an interesting first introduction to the founder of Relief Network Ministries, Ambrose Ochiabuto Sunny Okorie.
“In Houston, we went to a mid-sized church,” says David. “One Sunday, a man in full Nigerian garb came in. He certainly stood out from our normal crowd. That’s when I first met Sunny and began to get to know him. Sunny and Relief Network drill about 15 to 20 water wells each year in Niger and Nigeria. Because he’s well known for his work with the wells, he gets a chance to preach in churches. He told stories about three or four hundred people coming to Christ after he preached. I thought surely he was exaggerating, but he’s not. I got independent verification on those numbers. Sunny leverages his well drilling into preaching and soul salvation — it’s a full package and it is our favorite charity as far as return on investment.”
When David and Monya reflect back on their years of giving, they point to the teachings of Crown Financial Ministries. “We began living by the Crown principles that God owns it ALL! God requires a tenth, but He is more interested to see what you do with the remaining 90% He has given you to steward,” says Monya. “We never saw God fail us — even when our son, Michael, was diagnosed with a brain tumor at the age of seven. We were secure in the knowledge, all through Michael’s treatments, that God had a greater interest in our son than we did — we were only the stewards. Kind of like Abraham with Isaac, we had to trust that God knew best — whatever the outcome. Everything belongs to God, not just money.”
The coolest thing, say David and Monya, is that the “giving legacy” has been passed on to their children. “It has been wonderful to hear their stories of supporting people and causes — they have a real heart for giving. Oh, they certainly heard us go on and on for years about building up treasures in heaven and why we do what we do with our giving. Our children understand the difference in needs and wants. Because they can say ‘I don’t need that’ it’s easy for them to give. When we first made our will years ago, our children were small and it took us a while to figure out that the worst thing we could do was to give them too much money. We have a lot of blessings from being poor in our younger years. We did not have a
refrigerator or stove for our first six months of marriage. There are lots of memories and lessons we learned. We don’t want to deny them the blessings and memories that their own hard work can bring. Giving them too much or leaving too much could cause harm, so we choose to give it away instead.”
RESOURCES & LINKS
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