It’s Giving Tuesday, a time to advocate and practice radical generosity.

Radical generosity is “the concept that the suffering of others should be as intolerable to us as our own  suffering.” In other words, to love your neighbor as yourself.

In the numbing world of media overload, human loneliness or suffering becomes a mere passing image on a screen. How to get past that?

We learned from our founding board chair “to turn strangers into friends and friends into family.” That’s how to practice radical generosity.

We have experienced this transformation firsthand in fieldwork with all our dreamers:

• While seated on the floor in rural Lebanon, I found myself overwhelmed with jet lag and exhaustion on my first visit to a Bedouin family. The next thing I knew, I woke up from a nice nap on those floor cushions, all wrapped in a warm blanket.

   

• Spotting rebel flags on the Iraqi horizon, we detoured via side tracks to locate a dreamer candidate taking refuge on a village kindergarten floor. Our nervous driver had to depart before dark, so we asked this refugee family if we could stay the night. They took us in, sharing their meager food aid rations and borrowed foam pads, even moving their kids out to sleep with other relatives.

   

• Then after hiking a trail in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal, we arrived at dreamer candidates’ handmade mudbrick home. His parents’ thick blankets kept us cozy as the temperature dropped below freezing. We woke up to discover his mother had slept out in the open; his father had slept downstairs with the farm animals!

Time and again, when those people set eyes on us for the very first time, they practiced that adage we learned from our founding board chair.  They turned strangers into friends, and friends into family.  They adopted us as their brothers and sisters.

Usually on Giving Tuesday, we inform you about year-end giving opportunities. This note is not that message – that invitation will arrive in your inbox soon.  

Rather, today on this Giving Tuesday, we encourage and challenge you to take a look around. Do you see a stranger? Not just an image on a screen, or someone blending into the scenery, but a real living and breathing stranger?

Now, consider how to turn that stranger into a friend. And if you dare, even upgrade that friend into family. You and they will never be the same.  

Let’s celebrate radical generosity today and every day!