A message arrives from someone you have not spoken to in years. A parent needs surgery. An account number is attached, and a photograph of a hospital bill that may or may not be real. You have just been paid. Not much is left after rent and the small emergencies that always find a way to arrive before the salary does. You send something anyway. You do not ask why the message found you specifically, out of everyone this person knows. You do not ask for a follow-up. You do not ask whether the story is true. You give because you have a little, and somebody, apparently, has less. That is where this reflection begins, not with an answer, because I do not have one, but with that small, ordinary, endlessly complicated moment that repeats itself in different forms across every life I know.

We are taught, in church and at home and in the quiet moral arithmetic we each carry, that giving is a virtue that does not require an explanation. Give because you can. Give because it is right. Give and do not look too closely at what happens after the money leaves your hand. But the longer I live, the more that simple instruction dissolves into questions I cannot fully answer, and I have come to believe those questions are the more honest place to live than any comfortable certainty about what a good person does with what they have.

The Arithmetic of Enough

Do we give because we have enough, or because we have decided, in the moment, that we can survive having a little less? Those are not the same thing, and I think we blur them on purpose because the second one is frightening to sit with. When I give from what is clearly surplus, giving costs me almost nothing. It is easy, it is even pleasant, and it lets me feel generous without feeling the loss. But is that generosity, or is it simply a redistribution of what I was never going to miss? There is a version of giving that asks nothing of the giver, and I wonder whether we have quietly agreed, as a culture, to call that giving at all.

Then there is the giving that costs something. The friend who does not have enough for both the school fees and the loan repayment, and gives to the loan anyway because someone else’s need felt louder than his own. The neighbour who borrows from one person to lend to another, standing in a gap she cannot really afford to stand in, hoping to repay both debts before either one collapses on her. Is that generosity or is it a kind of quiet self-harm dressed in the language of virtue? I have done this. I suspect you have too. And I am genuinely unsure, even now, whether I would tell a younger version of myself to do it again.

Giving from surplus costs nothing. Giving from lack asks whether generosity and self-neglect are sometimes the same gesture wearing different names.

There is a story, familiar to anyone raised in the church, of a widow who gave two small coins into the temple treasury while wealthier people gave large, visible sums. The account tells us the coins were, in real terms, everything she had left to live on, while the larger gifts around her cost their givers nothing they would notice missing. The story is usually told as praise for her faith. I have come to read it differently, as a question rather than a resolution. What does it actually mean to praise a poor widow for giving away her last coins? Are we celebrating her generosity, or are we, without quite admitting it, celebrating our own comfort with the idea that the poor should keep giving until there is nothing left, while the rest of us give from what we will never miss?

The Problem of Not Knowing

Here is where it gets harder, because generosity does not happen in a sealed room. It happens in a world where people lie, and where some of the people asking for help have learned, with real skill, how to sound exactly like the people who genuinely need it. How do you tell the difference between someone drowning and someone who has simply learned to perform drowning very convincingly? I do not think you always can, and I think pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.

In 2017, a homeless man in Philadelphia named Johnny Bobbitt gave his last twenty dollars to a stranded motorist so she could buy fuel to get home. The story was true, and it was beautiful, and the woman and her boyfriend started an online fundraiser to thank him for it. Over fourteen thousand people gave, moved by an act of generosity from a man who had almost nothing. The fund raised more than four hundred thousand dollars. What the donors did not know was that the couple running the fundraiser had quietly turned the whole story into something closer to a business, spending the money on themselves while Bobbitt received only a fraction of what was raised. Eventually the truth came apart, as truth tends to, and all three of them, the couple and the homeless man they had claimed to be helping, were charged with theft by deception. The tragedy was not only that donors were deceived. It is that an authentic act of goodness became the raw material for a fraud, and that the people reading the original story had no real way of knowing, at the time, which version of it they were responding to.

I do not tell this story to argue against giving. I tell it because it names, precisely, the fear that sits underneath every request for help that reaches us through a screen rather than a face we know. We live inside systems, particularly across the West, that are built on an assumption of good faith. Say you are in need, present it plainly, and the system is largely designed to believe you first and verify later, if at all. That architecture of trust is generous, and it is also exactly what gets exploited, again and again, by people who have learned to speak its language without meaning a word of it. And when the fraud is traced back to any single country, the reputational cost does not fall on the individual con artist alone. It falls on everyone who shares his passport. Anyone who has watched what the word Nigerian does to a stranger’s face in certain conversations knows exactly what I mean, and knows how unfairly that cost is distributed, since it lands hardest on the honest majority who never asked to inherit another man’s lie.

When the Giver Has Stolen What He Gives

There is a particular Nigerian corruption of giving that deserves its own honest look, because it has warped what an entire generation understands generosity to mean. In 2014, after losing the governorship election in Ekiti State, a defeated candidate coined a phrase that has never left our political vocabulary since: stomach infrastructure, the practice of winning votes not with policy but with rice, cash, and immediate material comfort handed directly to hungry people on the day it matters most. It worked. It has kept working. Politicians who have never built a road or fixed a hospital distribute bags of rice branded with their own faces and call it generosity, and a population worn down by decades of broken promises often takes it, not out of naivety, but because a bag of rice today is more certain than a manifesto that will likely never be honoured.

This is giving with the moral content surgically removed. The money being given away was rarely earned by the person giving it. It was extracted from the same people now lining up to receive a fraction of it back, dressed up as benevolence. And it teaches something corrosive in both directions at once: it teaches the politician that generosity is a tool for manufacturing loyalty rather than an expression of care, and it teaches the citizen that giving and taking are simply two sides of the same transaction, that anyone with money owes it to whoever is asking, regardless of how that money was made. I have watched that second lesson metastasize far beyond politics, into the way some people now approach anyone perceived to have more than they do, not as a fellow human who might choose to help, but as an obligated source that has, by virtue of visible comfort, forfeited the right to say no.

What Giving Looks Like When It Works

It would be dishonest to end on cynicism alone, because giving does still work, sometimes spectacularly. Since 2019, the philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has given away tens of billions of dollars to thousands of nonprofit organisations, and the defining feature of her approach is not the size of the gifts but their almost total absence of conditions. No lengthy applications, no rigid reporting requirements, no demand that every dollar be tracked and justified before the next one arrives. Independent research on the outcomes has found that this kind of unrestricted trust actually produces stronger, more resilient organisations than the conventional model of tightly monitored, narrowly directed funding. She does the scrutiny quietly, before the money moves, and once it moves, she lets go of it completely.

I find that instructive, not because most of us will ever give away billions, but because it suggests that the discernment and the generosity do not have to live in the same moment. You can ask hard questions, take your time, look closely at who you are trusting, before you give. What you should not do, if the giving is to mean anything, is keep interrogating the gift after it has left your hand. At some point, either you trusted enough to let go, or you did not really give at all, you only lent something with your anxiety still attached to it.

The Questions I Am Left With

So where does that leave the ordinary act of sending money to a stranger’s account number at eleven at night, moved by a story you cannot verify. I am not going to pretend I have arrived somewhere solid. I give, and then I wonder whether I gave because I was generous or because refusing felt worse than being deceived. I wonder whether the discomfort I feel when I say no is really about the other person’s need, or about what saying no might mean about the kind of man I am. I wonder whether a society that has normalised stealing from the public purse and calling the leftovers generosity has quietly poisoned even the private, sincere version of giving that has nothing to do with politics at all. I wonder whether trust, once it becomes a fixed system that con artists can study and exploit, can survive being systematised, or whether real trust only ever happens person to person, one unrepeatable decision at a time.

I do not know if giving stops being virtuous the moment it becomes strategic, calculated, hedged against the possibility of fraud. I do not know if refusing to give, out of a reasonable fear of being used, is wisdom or is simply fear wearing a more respectable name. What I keep returning to is this: perhaps the value of giving was never meant to be located in whether the gift landed where it was needed. Perhaps it was always meant to be located in what the act does to the giver, in whether it keeps a person’s hands open in a world that gives them every reason to close them. If that is true, then even the giving that gets exploited, even the naive twenty dollars handed to a stranger who turns out to be part of a con, may not have been wasted in the way we assume. But I am not certain of that either. I am only certain that the question deserves more of our honest attention than the easy answer we usually reach for, which is simply to keep giving and hope, quietly, that this time it mattered.