Generosity

Evagrius of Pontus was a very influential early Christian thinker (and practitioner) of prayer.  In writing about the sin of avarice, he writes that our need for material goods:

"suggests to the mind a lengthy old age, inability to perform manual labor (at some future date), famines that are sure to come, sickness that will visit us, the pinch of poverty, the great shame that comes from accepting the necessities of life from others." (quoted from Allen, 72)

Diogenes Allen comments:

"These thoughts fill us with anxiety and insecurity, and keep us from being generous.  Our minds become so full of the desire to gain enough material goods to make ourselves secure against every possible calamity that we fail to pay sufficient attention to either our neighbor or God.  Or if we do consider them, we do so largely in terms of how they may help make us financially secure.  One of the fruits of the Spirit, indicative of God's activity in our lives, is that we become like God - namely, generous." (Allen, Spiritual Theology, 72)

Generosity will not come from thinking about our things.  Thinking about our things as the fruit of God's activity in our lives - God's things - will help us to think and to live more generously.