In my new and current role, I have been blessed with the opportunity to guide young people toward the direction of service.
Service seems simple. It appears to be a close and shut case, right? Wrong. We live in a world that supports the idea that service comes with stipulations. I will bless you if you NEED it. I will bless you if you meet my standards of what neediness looks like. I will bless you if you look the part, meet my mental picture of what neediness looks like, or if you appear to be trying to bless yourself.
When I pass you at an intersection holding a sign stating you need help to feed your starving children, only, if only, I feel like you are deserving of my blessing, I will concede and then sit back basking in my self-righteous glory that I gave and fulfilled my command to God.
What a terrible and misguided mentality that is.
Who am I? Who am I to determine your level of neediness or deserving when I am so blissfully and undeservingly blessed? Sure, I get up and go to work every morning and so does my husband. But does that mean that we are more deserving than any other human being to receive love and light? Plenty of people work their entire lives to never get the chance to live as comfortably as most of us do. It’s completely narcissistic to the think that hard-work alone placed you in such a comfortable place. And if you do believe that……
We make snap judgements and say “they should” or “if they did”, but the reality is that those stipulations are self-centered and nasty. True grace is given with no knowledge or understanding of the recipient. After all, the grace most of us so readily accept is given rather than earned, yet we aren’t willing to offer the same to our fellow man.
As Christians, we accept a grace we did nothing to deserve. We are freely given a love and grace that we offered no sweat, no pain, no work to receive. Yet, we turn to our neighbor and say, “you don’t meet my expectations of my gift, therefore you are unworthy.” How conceited. How arrogant to think that we are the Shepards that get to dole out the haves and have nots of those around us.
I make so many mistakes. More than I genuinely care to admit. But I strive to teach our children (mine and yours) that service is not a blessing to hold fast to–waiting for the opportunity to bless someone that meets a mental picture we have of a deserving candidate, but an idea that as blessed and freed people we are called to serve blindly. We are called to serve all. That means we serve those who look the part, just the same as those who do not. So often students ask me, “what if they spend the money on drugs?” What if they do? “What if they don’t really need it?” What if they don’t? None of those variables change any part of the equation because we are the Shepherds of our own souls. Service is our calling. It is our responsibility. The only thing we are in control of, accountable for, and responsible for is ourselves.
In a mad rush this morning, I pulled into the gas station trying to decide how I was going to pump my gas and get on the road in time to make my appointment. My leg is broken and pumping it on crutches would have taken triple the time. When I pulled into the station I saw a former student I hadn’t seen in years. In a rush, I asked him to help me. Without asking for a single detail, without asking me to justify why I needed him, he smiled and said, “yes.” It was a perfect example of grace. He was ready and willing to help me without any qualifiers or explanation.
In my home there have been many heated conversations about my blind and sometimes silly service. My husband and I both teeter on the edge of going too far at times and have to check ourselves and one another because it is easy to get all wrapped up in the process. I steer far from any public proclamations that bring light toward us because that is ugly. The ugliest of ugly, really. Truthfully, that is just as detrimental toward His purpose as any other selfish act we could mention. But in this season, I feel it important to remind myself and all of us that we do not give because of the merit of the recipient. We bless because we were blessed without stipulations. We were loved before we were worthy. We were blessed before we deserved it. None of us will ever truly be worthy of the love we freely receive. Let us look around and search for the opportunity to bless, and to bless without requirement or restriction. We love because He first loved us.
So much love — Shalom,
❤️