The "I'm Ready Now!" Podcast
Ideas to help you when you're ready for change.
The "I'm Ready Now!" Podcast
EP 31: Beyond Financial Giving: Life's Alternate Tithes (Hint: It Costs You NOTHING!)
What would it mean to tithe more than just your money? In this thought-provoking exploration, I dive deep into Dan Miller's expanded vision of the tithing principle that goes far beyond financial giving.
Most of us understand tithing as giving 10% of our income, but what about dedicating 10% of our time to meaningful service? Or sharing 10% of our unique ideas with the world? These alternate forms of tithing might actually create more abundance in our lives and communities than we ever imagined possible.
In our discussion we turn to Mark Victor Hansen, co-creator of "Chicken Soup for the Soul," who offers a fascinating perspective: "If you have a penny and I have a penny and we exchange pennies, you still have one cent and I still have one cent. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange ideas, you now have two ideas and I now have two ideas." This synergistic effect demonstrates why sharing our creativity and insights creates prosperity for everyone involved.
Throughout the episode, I share my personal journey with time tithing – from mentoring my son through critical life decisions to launching a podcast club for students and volunteering my drumming skills at church. These experiences have shown me firsthand the truth behind Leonard Nimoy's profound observation: "The miracle is this: the more we share, the more we have."
What could you tithe from your life today other than just money? The answer might transform not only how you give, but how you live.
Ready to explore this powerful principle with me? Listen now!
Welcome to the I'm Ready Now podcast ideas to help you when you're ready for change. I'm your host, isaac Sanchez, here. I share my musings on whatever it is I am reading at the moment, as well as any other ideas that I believe will help you break free from a standstill in your thinking in order to get you dreaming again. Thank you for joining me today. Well, I'm ready now. How about you? Excellent, so let's get started. Well, hello, hello, hello, and welcome back everyone. It is so great to see you. I hope things are going well with you and that, whatever you're doing as you listen right now dishes, treadmill, mowing the lawn, using this to take a nap, to put you to sleep Am I putting you to sleep? Whatever it is, I really do appreciate you coming back and listening, and so, even if it is putting you to sleep, I'm happy to be useful in that way too. Thank you so much, folks. Seriously, I do appreciate you listening. Well, let's get on here with the housekeeping. Hit those chapter markers if you want to bounce around to different parts of the podcast. That's wonderful. Also, please reach out to me. Give me some feedback here if you feel that you want to do that, whether it's the topics we're addressing, or you have an idea that you want me to cover on the podcast, just do that. And you can do that by hitting that tap to text on wherever you found this podcast. There's a tap to text link and that'll reach out to me. And then the other way, as always, is just emailing me at IsaacSanchez, at Maccom. Well, what's up in your world? Rat-a-tat-tat, my drum studio is set up. Everyone, uh, listen, about two weeks ago, um, I just pulled the trigger and just said set those things up in the in the room right now. Now it's tight in this room. It really is tight in here. I have the drums right behind me, uh, and in front of me is my monitor. If you've seen any pictures of me shooting on social media, you know picture of me having wrapped up a podcast. You see the little desk area. Well, if I spin the seat around, the drums are right there and they are all mic'd up. They are ready to go. And so, again, this is about two weeks ago I just decided you know what, just you got to get those drums out of the garage and get them in here and just start doing something. And you know what? Just you got to get those drums out of the garage and get them in here and just start doing something. And you know there's. There's because of the limited space. I kept any percussion gear in the garage and so I'll take it as I need it. Now.
Speaker 1:My initial thoughts and the reason I had kept the drums out of the house here that we're renting is I just thought it's just going to be too loud. And you know where I used to live some years ago when I had this, the drum studio, set up. I had a detached garage and there was space all around between the in a single family home, between the neighbors, and I would always, just, you know, be respectful and quit at a certain time, but I never had an issue at all. So that's been in my head when I'm you know, as I've been here I thought, okay, you know, we're sharing walls with someone on the other side over here. But then my wife, who you know was speaking to the neighbor that we share a wall with, here out in this kind of townhome, and she says wait, you guys don't hear when I have my music on really, really loud and we're like, no, we've never heard it at all. She says oh, I'm surprised because I turn up my music kind of loud, we haven't heard it. And that got me thinking between their wall, it's our bedroom and then this room. So one wall separates our bedroom from this room. That's my wall to the left. The wall behind me is part of the house. The wall to my right faces no one. There's a sidewalk up front, then there's a little embankment up there and a little fence that goes down to the main street down there. So there's nothing there. And the wall in front of me has a walkway outside before it reaches the other house.
Speaker 1:It dawned on me like you know what, maybe I can make some noise. So I just said just get the drums here. Let's just get that far set up. Because the other thing was that even if it was loud, I can niche down. Let's say and just say you know what, while you're here in this circumstances that you're in just record ballads? There's these things called blast sticks. They're nylon sticks. There's hot rods, which are bamboo sticks. There's the wire brushes, like, just like, do that advertise to record um kind of uh mellow tunes with your drums. You won't need your sticks for this. But after that um conversation my wife had with the neighbor. It's like you know what I'm going to set up. I'm going to pull these sticks out, and uh.
Speaker 1:What I haven't done yet, though, is I haven't gotten levels, so I've not banged on these things loud enough, and so this weekend I'm going to have my wife go out there while I play a little bit and ask her hey, would you hear that or not? And then ask the neighbors who share a wall that is separated between our bedroom, so there's all that space and just ask them hey, are you hearing anything? Of course, the same rules would apply. I would not be playing later than nine, nine, 30. And I wouldn't even do that late in here, because, you know, I wouldn't want to be making all kinds of racket for Lydia either. So, you know, the yay is that the drums are set up and they're mic'd up. The boo is that I don't have any levels yet, and that will be this weekend. I'm going to make sure that I do that, and so I'm really excited about that. So we'll check the noise bleeding out here, see if it's bothering anyone, and then I'll get the levels set and I will start recording.
Speaker 1:You know, my whole goal is just to start taking and working again. I've done this before for friends and some family. I've just not worked hard at doing anything outside of that, and so I want to expand that circle. There's a drummer out in Memphis I follow on Instagram. He was actually an ultrasound tech, but he'd go home and he'd record drums, record covers, and he just kept doing it consistently, which is the key. And next thing you know he was getting calls from around the world to record files. The way it works now you can just send files to the drummer. He's got a drum set set up at home, like I do here. It worked that way. So that's the idea, and I used to post covers consistently and got some good feedback on that. It was just a lot of fun. Set up a camera, a little bit of lights and just hit record and you know the work. You know, with this other guy, the work came his way eventually and so it's a lot of fun. It's what I love to do, but it is a way for me to help others and to earn an income, and so I'm going to start doing that. Let's just have fun and see where that goes.
Speaker 1:I love recording. I'm happy to play live, but I just love recording drums and percussion, and so we're up, we're up here doing it again, but we're going to get some signals, some levels, set up tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm recording this on a Saturday night, so on Sunday we'll get some levels and check the sound out there and see what's going on. So I'm just the main thing is I'm just really excited to see the drums out of the garage and right here in this space. Anytime I pull up into the garage and see them up there on the shelving up there, I just think, man, that needs to change real fast. And so it did change real fast a couple of weeks ago and we're going to wrap that up this week, and so I'm pretty excited about that. Going to be making music again and hopefully maybe you'll get to see that and hear some of that as well.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move into this week's topic. If you recall, in the tease last week I was trying to fix your tithe, not your tie, your tithe. Let's find out today how Dan Miller gives an interesting perspective to add to the idea of the tithe. Now, if that's new to you, I'm going to be sure to give you a bit of a background today and then we'll move on into the concepts that he shares with us. Well, tithing is a life principle Dan Miller shares with us, and he first points out the notion of monetary tithing, and that is something that most would be familiar with. A tithe is a 10%, and it's giving 10% of your income to a cause of your choice, whatever that is, and you believe in some cause and so you say I'm going to give 10% of my income to that. So it is a financial principle that has even no religious tie-in or identity. In other words, there's companies. There's businesses that just know in their finances, in their budget, they're giving this amount as part of what they do with their finances and, of course, I'm sure there's tax benefits to that.
Speaker 1:Now what Dan brings up is an alternate tithing idea time tithing. And in time tithing, as you might surmise, it's the idea of using a percentage of your time that you have, whatever your time is, that you work for that week and say let me give 10% of that time to some meaningful service, a variety of things you can do with that, but you can use that time to help others in some ways, and so that's what he brings up. But then the idea of tithing itself to kind of position this is. It does have its historical context. So let me just share a little bit of that with you, because you know the idea behind the tithe. If you're not familiar with it, let me just give you some background on that a bit briefly.
Speaker 1:It's this idea that we recognize that you know God owns everything. It's His, it belongs to Him, it's His provision, and so you acknowledge that divine source and that's a core principle, that by offering your tenth, you acknowledge that that's who it comes from in the first place, that you've received this blessing from God. So it was a symbolic offering. It's a tangible way to recognize His provision and to return that portion to what he had given, to recognize his provision and to return that portion to what he had given. So it's this very physical manifestation of a faith and a dependence on God.
Speaker 1:Another thing is it would these are biblical days it would support the Levitical priesthood. This was a group, one of the tribes of Israel, and they were the priests, and so they would take care of the temple or the tabernacle. And so you know, in the Old Testament this tribe was designated for their priestly service. That's just what their role was, and because they didn't receive any kind of land inheritance from any tribes and they needed to have some way to sustain themselves as they served in the, you know, in the temple or the tabernacle. So the tithe was the principle hey, bring your tithe to the temple. That's going to support them, allowing them to dedicate themselves wholly to the religious duties, maintain the tabernacle, you know, later the temple, conduct the sacrifices, teach the law, all of that. And so, basically, it's maintaining the religious institutions that ensure that there was financial stability there and that things can go on, and enable them to function effectively, you know, serve spiritual needs of the very community that was supporting them.
Speaker 1:Also, part of that would go to caring for the poor, widows, orphans, and so there's this social welfare aspect that would be tied to the tithe as well. So, even though there's these religious, you know, primary purposes, is this religious support? There's also some references in Scripture of its significant social welfare component, and you know. So. You know I'm not going to get into great detail on this part because I don't know the details of that. I can look some of this up that I've. You know I'm going deeper into the weeds than I intended here, but it was this safety measure for the most vulnerable members of society. And so there's some rules about a triennial tithe that was specifically designated for these Levites and the stranger and the fatherless and the widow in the community. So there was that so really cool stuff tied to the tithe and it was a communal responsibility.
Speaker 1:The tithing it reinforced this notion of you know, hey, we're all in this together and responsible for the well-being of others in the least of these as well. So we're here to help them because we can. The marginalized and they could not for some temporary means or means, you know, for their life, because of illness or loss of a spouse or whatever. You know they need that support, so we're here for that. And then it comes down to just obedience to God's command. There was a divine mandate of tithing. It's specifically commanded in various parts. One very famous one that many believers in terms of the Christian faith would know is Malachi 3.10. It actually says, hey, if you're not tithing, you're actually stealing from God. So it's a very powerful notion. That why the tithe should be obeyed, and it has this covenant relationship. So, hey, if you tithe, there'll be blessings that will be given to you, and there's different teachings on what that looks like, how that might manifest itself. So divine favor comes with it and it helps one, the believer, trust in God's provision. So that's all this background that a lot of us grew up with in the tithe.
Speaker 1:Now what Dan does next is he kind of sends this off to Mark Victor Hansen. He was a co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul for an idea that he had regarding tithing and it's further. It's an alternate tithon is hey, we should share 10% of the ideas that we have to the world. Now you get the idea of the concept here, how you actually nail down what 10% is. We're going to set this aside for a bit. The notion is he says share 10% of your ideas that you have to the world and that would help create wealth and prosperity for others. Now he kind of makes a point that you know we're all unique. We have our own unique minds, creativity. We're unique spirits, we have unique ideas and tithing is free. So it wouldn't hurt you to do that. So tithe your ideas, your unique ideas, because you are unique, and let's just put them out there.
Speaker 1:And the notion is that ideas follow ideas. So you know synergy. Basically, you've probably been in a situation where you're kind of brainstorming some ideas and all, and someone says why don't we do this? Like someone says, no, I don't know if that would work, but how about this? And so another idea comes up. But that idea that came up was generated over an idea that was not followed through with. So there's this synergy that starts to happen and ideas become a springboard to ideas. So you drop something into the brainstorm and that becomes a springboard for my ideas, or I do the same thing, and it becomes a springboard for your ideas. So that's what Mark Victor Hansen suggests, and there's a great quote here If you have a penny and I have a penny and I have a penny, and we exchange pennies, you still have one cent and I still have one cent. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange ideas, you now have two ideas and you now have two ideas and I now have two ideas. Close quote what a wonderful concept that Hanson brings up here.
Speaker 1:So you know, tithing your ideas, let's get them out there, don't be afraid to share them, and let the revolution of ideas begin because of our willingness to share with others. Well, as usual, grab your note-taking items, journal writing advice, whether it's analog or digital, and let's go ahead and jump into this. There's one question that Dan Miller asks us to consider today, and it's this what could you tithe from your life today other than just money? So let's set the monetary idea aside for now. Let's concentrate this time on where Dan has taken us today. Again, the question what could you tithe from your life today other than just money?
Speaker 1:Now, as I was looking at my notes that I had looked at and you know, as I was going through the book and get ready for the podcast, it was the idea of helping my son, and this would have been in, I think, 2020. And so you know, I he's 20 years old, he's looking just to grab a job, a J-O-B, as Dan Miller would say Just get that J-O-B. And so he's 20 years old. We had just moved to Santa Ana and again, this was moving on from a divorce and so I need to go situate myself somewhere. So that's where we headed, and he had just gotten back from boot camp, utterly proud of this young man. As a matter of fact, we were just on the phone today. He just got back from Utah. He was out there three weeks for a training. He just did exemplary over there. He got a certification that Army National Guard was training him for and came back today, or came back about a week ago, and found out from his unit that they wanted to get him trained in on some particular communication device so which requires some certification and all this stuff goes to helping him be promoted. So just excited for him.
Speaker 1:So throwback about five years and we'd moved to Santa Ana and he just got back from bootcamp and he was ready to do some school and work. Now he had sworn he would not go back to school after high school but while he was out there I remember him writing me letters as we were exchanging letters back and forth that hey, that's, you know, I'm thinking of going back to school. So it was wonderful that he was thinking about that and so he started doing that, that, and so he started doing that. Now he decided to stay with me through this divorce only because he wanted my insight for his career decisions and life decisions and military decisions, and I appreciate that very much. He and I have had an incredible relationship since he was a young boy. We've been able to talk about anything, literally anything, and we still do. I love that. If I can imagine the best relationship a father can have with his son, this is it that he and I have.
Speaker 1:So he was living with me and so while we were there together we worked through some questions with him his journey through jobs, his journey through school. You know his decisions to drop out of school when COVID hit, not drop out as in a dropout, but to leave because he just could not stand being on a Zoom thing. He was getting. I think it was an A and a B in the two classes he was taking. It could have been two A's, but I know there was an A and I believe the other one was a B, nothing lower than that. And you know he just said I cannot be sitting on that Zoom in a breakout room with no one talking. I need to be in front of that professor in the class handing him my homework. So he had good reasons. As an educator, seeing my own students dealing with that, I thoroughly understood what he was going through at the time and so we would go on hikes together and even when they're his job search, I helped him with all of that, helped him put a resume together. He did the bulk of the work, but I was there to support him proudly.
Speaker 1:There was a time where I thought I was going to head straight out to Nashville, tennessee, where my brother's out there with his wife and their kids, my dad's out there now with them, and I was just going to wait for my daughter to graduate. I knew she was going to be going to a local university here and so I just thought, okay, I'm going to move on. And this is pre-Lydia, before we met, and I had no idea that I was going to be having my whole life turned upside down in a wonderful way. So I did find myself setting time aside. So when I read in my journal Dan Miller's question, I wrote about that Like you could be putting time aside and helping Kian with this and these different questions, these different actual activities that he was doing to set his life in order in these different areas Work, you know, career, budding career and work helping with him to buy his first vehicle, which, absolutely out of the blue I've shared this before sent him in a direction of loving to work on cars and becoming a mechanic at Toyota. So it was just through this, working together. That was just a wonderful thing.
Speaker 1:Now, again, some of you may be saying well, that's just what you do as a dad, I get it. I 100% agree with you. The idea, though, is, when I read Dan Miller's question here when I was going through the book, that's what came to my mind. You certainly have four to five hours that you can give your son more if necessary, obviously, but you can give that time in this area of his life by helping him walk through, and so that's where my thoughts went. Now, currently, as I kind of think through it now, I just think okay, where am I at now? One is my time, I can tithe my time as a volunteer. You know, one volunteer opportunity is a podcast club that I started at work. That you know. I launched it, and the whole point is to.
Speaker 1:There's three keys to wanting to do this. One is to launch student podcasts, help them start their own podcast. The school had bought some wonderful gear, and so they let me have that to be able to do this work, and they've since bought other microphones and interfaces. So it's a wonderful thing, and there's some students that are excited about doing this. So Launched Student Podcast is one goal. The second one is to launch a school podcast and to go deeper on the announcements. We have video announcements every day and there's these little stories that get hit. These announcements are done within six to 10 minutes, sometimes five minutes, but there's some stories that the podcast would be able to go deeper into. You know deeper, you know longer format with the interviews and stories that are being told there. And the third one is the NPR National Podcast Challenge. They have a college, a high school I think they're doing junior high and middle school also and there's a national podcast challenge that NPR has been doing for several years now, and so one of my goals is to get a team, a couple of teams together, to produce podcasts and submit them. Based on what I've seen with some of the kids, there's a wonderful talent of kids that they can take this on. They can absolutely come back with some awards there, so I'm hoping we can do that this year.
Speaker 1:A second volunteer opportunity is just me drumming at church. I've always done that and I like to volunteer my time there. That happens tends to happen on the weekends. There are other events where they need music and it may happen during the midweek, or other weekend events where they need music and it may happen during the midweek or other weekend events, and so I'm happy to do that. The church that I'm attending now these folks on their team write music and they record the music, and so they now know I'm new to this church but they now know that I do that they have recordings of what I've done church, but they now know that I do that they have recordings of what I've done. So maybe I can help with that and I'd be tithing time as well. So you know other ideas that I've thought about, you know is ideas like maybe like a mastermind. You know what Hanson was saying about the synergy of ideas. That sounds very much like a mastermind and I'm totally interested in that. I'm just not sure if I can give time to that right now.
Speaker 1:Lydia and I had talked about at one point of doing like vision boards or helping people put their battle boards together. That's a phrase I learned from Brendan Burchard. We just have that whiteboard or poster paper on the wall. I've just got everything marked up and you can look at that daily and see what are you headed toward, what's your vision? Vision boards are a little bit different, of course. You can be a collage of ideas that you look at and you start to kind of envision where do you want to go, where are you headed, what do you want to see in the future and just manifest that kind of envision where do you want to go, where are you headed, what do you want to see in the future and just manifest that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:And we thought it'd be great to help other people do that, bring them into our living room People are forward thinking and host those in our living room. That's been something we've wanted to do as well. It came out of a wonderful thought a couple of years ago and then, with getting married and making the move, you know we've lost sight of that. So today's idea that we're looking at today brought that back to my mind. I thought that'd be really, really cool to start looking at that again and seeing if that's something that we might be able to do. So you know, those are the ideas that I started thinking about that I thought, hey, you know what else besides an income? What is it that we can do? Dan Miller's question what could you t? And what I thought through about helping my son? Certainly have helped my daughter as well. But these are the notes that I made because he was in a very she was still in high school at the time. Things were kind of lined up for her at that point. He was the one that was making these important career decisions and military decisions at the time.
Speaker 1:So what is it for you? What is it? Where does your mind go as you think about this question? About what other areas, what things can you do to tie from your life today other than just money? What comes to mind for you? Maybe you can just sit in silence, take a good walk, whatever it is that you do that can get your mind in this space and start to think, yeah, how can I use that time? And start to think, yeah, how can I use that time, whether it's working with others to brainstorm ideas and that synergy that Hanson talked about, or if it's what Dan Miller's talking about, whether it's time that you can give to others to serve others, but giving something that might help you move forward, as you are willing to give of your ideas and give you your time, I think you're going to find some wonderful things that come to your mind that you might have thought of before, or maybe, hopefully, something in what I've said here might generate some ideas for you. I wish you the very best as you think through this, as you think you do this.
Speaker 1:Do you remember that a couple of weeks ago we stripped the boat? That was important work. We learned about that. Well, now let's set sail on that boat, metaphorically, of course. And if we sail quote the first hour is the rudder of the day close quote. So next week, dan Miller will help show us just how critical this first hour is.
Speaker 1:Okay, let me send you away with a quote here it is. The miracle is this the more we share, the more we have. And that comes to us from Leonard Nimoy. I was going to say Spock, but we're going to go with Leonard Nimoy. Well, that's it. That's a quote. Think about it, act on it.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for your company today, folks. I always appreciate it so much. I hope you got something out of this. In the meantime, we will see you next time. Thank you for listening. If you found this time together useful, please consider following this podcast and leaving an excellent rating. If you feel you can't do that yet, please reach out to me and let me know what I can do to get you to leave a top rating. If you are already excited about what you've heard, please consider sharing this podcast with a friend. I really would appreciate it. Also, I'd love your feedback, both on today's topic as well as what you'd like to hear me address in the future. I would really appreciate that input. Again, I'm your host, isaac Sanchez. I hope today's thought serves you the way it has served me. Remember your next move is just one inside away. Have an amazing rest of your day. I'll see you next time.