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40acts 2019: that's a wrap!

person Kezia Owusu-Yianoma
3 min

Another Lent has come and gone and once again we bore witness to thousands of acts of generosity.

It really is a privilege to sit behind the screen and produce a challenge that inspires a ripple of goodness into sometimes dry and tired lives. Though I can’t always feel the tangible impact of what we do, I know that the acts we have done over this Lent are causing a chain reaction of generosity that will hopefully keep picking up momentum.

Thousands of people across the world joined us to do Lent differently, and to every person we say a massive thank you and well done!

Seize Your Opportunity

The theme of 40acts this year was to ‘Seize Your Opportunity’. This year we imagined what it would look like if people woke up each day with the intention of being generous to someone on their mind. How would you see taking out the rubbish differently if you were looking for an opportunity to be generous? Maybe you would think to clear up your neighbour’s rubbish that had been ravaged by a fox, spilling over onto your drive? Or perhaps you would offer to share your recycling box with the person next door whose box had gone missing?

Generous acts don’t always need to be grand displays. Sometimes the most generous thing we can do in a day is to stop and notice, to see the obstacle in front of us as an opportunity to be generous.

Everyday generosity

Being generous is something we can do each day, whether we have a prompt in our inbox or not. Moving through our world in a way that puts others first is what it looks like to carry 40acts on past Lent. That’s what it looks like to love your neighbour.

This email from Maggie sums up what we here at Stewardship are trying to do!

I have followed 40acts for a number of years now and although I admit I don’t manage to do every act for every day, I have found my ‘mind-set has changed’. Rather than being engrossed in my own world, I now actively look out for my neighbour, on the bus, walking the dog, supermarket shopping, even in the gym. I now have conversations with ‘strangers’ in all sorts of places, I think this blesses them and it certainly blesses me, cheers my soul and makes for a much nicer day!

This year we launched the 40acts Bible Reading Plan on the YouVersion Bible App. We managed to get an exciting 12.5k subscriptions on the app, but what is more exciting is the fact that we could reach so many more people across the world, with the radical yet simple idea of everyday generosity.

Small acts of generosity might seem like creating a tiny ripple in a large ocean. It’s easy to look at the world around us and see the turmoil and upheaval as a forecasted definitive state of our culture. We believe something different. Seeing so many people willing to take part in 40 days of generosity again is proof enough to us that there is a culture shift happening. Provided we keep on making ripples, we might just create a wave.

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