I struggle with charitable giving. I always have. And I think it’s because of ambiguity.

When you buy a carton of eggs, you get instant feedback. You know what you paid. You know what you got. You crack the eggs the next morning and you know if it was good or bad.

Charity doesn’t work like that.

You give money and it disappears into a system you can’t see. You don’t really know what it bought. Was it food? Was it training? Was it staplers? Was it overhead? And overhead matters. Every real organization is mostly overhead. Even Apple and Google are mostly overhead.

But with charity, we want instant, visible good. And we almost never get it.

Then there’s the deeper problem. Even if the intention is good, we don’t always know if the outcome helps or harms. Does giving cash help? Does it make things worse? We don’t really know. Economists argue about it. Philosophers argue about it. And regular people just feel stuck.

I don’t have a clean answer.

What I do believe is this: charitable giving is less about certainty and more about practicing a bigger heart. Doing something you don’t fully understand. Acting without clear reinforcement.

And that might be the whole point.