Generous Disciples: What the Saints Teach Us About Stewardship

Twelve Wicker Baskets

In this episode, Meg Hunter-Kilmer, author of Pray for Us: 75 Saints Who Sinned, Suffered and Struggled On Their Way to Holiness, shares how she left her position as a high school theology teacher and set off to be an itinerant speaker, witnessing to the love of God, inspiring deeper faith, and sharing the universal attainability of sanctity by demonstrating how the saints in every age cooperated with grace.

Meg heard the baptismal call of the Lord in Matthew 16:24 in a very personal and direct way: “if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Calling herself a “hobo for Christ,” Meg has spent over a decade on the go to over 25 countries and all 50 states speaking from her heart about God. Charging nothing for her speaking events, she has relied upon God’s abundant providence in a radical way. One of her central messages is that the saints were not born saints. They are not “dull outlines of immaculate lives, saccharin, plaster images gazing vapidly heavenward,” as she had once imagined them to be. Thinking of saints like that makes becoming one impossible. No, saints “were real people, broken people made whole by grace, and that far from being [an] impossible standard…they offer nothing but hope.”
"Everybody’s got some element of their life that makes them think they’re ineligible for the love of God, or certainly ineligible for great holiness” Meg observed. But the diversity of saints, from varying backgrounds, cultures, ways of life, gifts and talents, shortcomings and sins, dismantles the notion that we are not the “stuff” of saints. “God is delighted with you exactly as you are,” she points out, “and he is working to make you a saint right now, not in spite of your circumstances, but in and through them.”
Wanting to tell stories and not just restate facts, Meg tells her audiences about the lives of saints from the human perspective. In this episode, she discusses four whose lives exemplified the heroic virtue of generosity and who understood their time, talent and treasure as gifts to be offered in stewardship: Ven. Pierre Toussaint, Ven. Satoko Kitahara, Bl. José Gregorio Hernández, St. Katharine Drexel.
Guest: Meg Hunter-Kilmer
Title: Author/Speaker

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