² For I know how eager you are to do it, and I have boasted to the friends in Macedonia that you were ready to send an offering a year ago. In fact, it was this enthusiasm of yours that stirred up many of them to begin helping. ³ But I am sending these men just to be sure that you really are ready, as I told them you would be, with your money all collected; I don’t want it to turn out that this time I was wrong in my boasting about you. ⁴ I would be very much ashamed—and so would you—if some of these Macedonian people come with me, only to find that you still aren’t ready after all I have told them!