Pass It On: Serving Together

These two have been serving me breakfast in bed since they were little.
It is usually as inedible as it is adorable.

As I write this, I am considering taking a Safe Families placement.  Well, truth be told, I already know what my answer will be, I'm just having a hard time dialing the number and saying, "yes."  Because here's what I know: there is a huge cost to serving others.  Whether it's serving at church as a nursery volunteer or community group leader; or serving in the community with at-risk youth or people with special needs; or serving at home as I do household tasks or bathe a baby or help with homework.  Serving others costs me, and I don't always see a tangible return on my investment.  Serving drains my energy, messes up my schedule, and sometimes it even empties my wallet.  Right now, I am running on reserves and I don't have what it takes to step up and serve.  I have my own kids and my own problems and my own stuff to get done.

Which is why now is the perfect time to serve.  Now, when I am unable to do this in my own strength, when I must rely completely on God, when I am asked to step out in faith.  And I say yes, knowing that God will strengthen and supply and direct.  I have learned that when I step out in faith, God works in bigger ways than I could imagine.

My experience with serving as a family started as a child.  I didn't grow up as a PK (pastor's kid) per se, but I grew up with my dad as our church's worship leader.  Not just A worship leader but THE ONLY worship leader.  So week after week, my dad ran worship practices and led worship twice on Sunday and spent hours listening to worship music and coordinating volunteers.  He had this awesome briefcase full of Integrity music tapes all neatly organized.  Super cool, I know. By the time I was in middle school, I couldn't wait to join the youth worship team, followed by the adult worship team where I volunteered with my dad and brother and a super cute boy who would grow up and marry me (not necessarily in that order).  Then that super cute boy became a pastor and voila!  My whole life revolved around church ministry.  Confession of a former pastor's

Packing food together at a Feed My Starving Children
event was one of my favorite serving opportunities.
When we were finished, the girls drew pictures and wrote
Bible verses all over the boxes.  Oh my heart.  

wife: ministry is highly inconvenient.  Being a pastor is a lifestyle.  When you're not actually serving, you're thinking about serving or recovering from serving or talking about serving.  It's exhausting... and incredibly fulfilling.  I wouldn't trade our years in ministry for the world, and my girls would tell you the same thing.  They are still mourning the loss of their identity as PKs.  Bless them.  The amazing thing about being a pastor's family is that your whole family serves together.  You have to be all in.  And being all in all together as a family is a great way to pass on your faith.  Because you can talk about spiritual things and read about spiritual things but it is in DOING spiritual things alongside of each other that the baton is truly passed.  Your children cannot take their faith and run with it if you are not already running, alongside of them, putting that faith to work.  

If you flip through the pages of the four Gospels, you will see story after story about serving.  Jesus feeds the 5,000, Jesus heals this person and preaches to that multitude, Jesus calms the storm, washes feet, sacrifices His life.  He gathers the 12, and then sets out to model servanthood, and doesn't stop until It. Is. Finished.  There is a moment in the Gospels, which follows a moment of bickering amongst the disciples, when Jesus turns to those 12 followers and tells them in Matthew 20:26-28, "...whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave - just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." Jesus did not serve out of convenience and He did not serve in isolation.  Jesus served always and in all things and He did it alongside of 12 bumbling followers who were watching and learning, their faith mustard-seed small growing into something that would fling the Gospel across the 4 corners of the earth.  Sounds a lot like parenting to me.

When we serve, we are simply being good stewards of the gifts that God has given us.  There are times that we look around at our many blessings and realize that we could be better stewards and share those blessings with others.  This is what happened several years ago when we were hit with the realization that our home, our support system of friends and family, and our pantry stocked with food were not OURS but God's, and out of our abundance we felt called to share these blessings with children in crisis - and so began our journey as a Safe Family.  There are other times when, after taking a hard look at what we have been blessed with and how we are sharing those blessings, we realize that we have been stewarding those blessings in ways we haven't even thought about.  I don't think twice about a dinner shared with friends, a meal cooked for a family with a new baby, a play date hosted or a box of outgrown clothes passed on.  These simple acts of service may seem trivial, but they are great opportunities to pause and cultivate a heart of servanthood in our children.  By inviting our children to help in the cleaning or cooking or preparing, and having a casual conversation about how and why we serve, we turn a simple act of service into a faith-building, family serving opportunity.  We have this wall in our house, that we refer to as our "What Needs To Be Done" wall.  It lists the things that need to be done on a board in the middle, and then each family member (Zion excluded) has a board where they choose tasks that need to be done and place them on their board (under "will do") as acts of service that they will complete (then they move it under "done").  It's a chore chart, people.  Except it's not - it's a way of seeing the mundane tasks as opportunities to serve each other.  And it cultivates a heart of serving in each of us.  These are not "Mom's chores" that "everyone else" is being forced to help with.  These are ways we can serve each and every member of our household, and everyone else we welcome through our doors.  

We often (the girls would tell you CONSTANTLY) ask the question:
What Needs to Be Done?

Serving alongside of your children, in ways big and small, is an essential way to pass on your faith.  When you serve together in ways that are far beyond your abilities, you will see God come through in ways that are far beyond your imagination.  And when you start to look for and at simple tasks as acts of service, you have the opportunity to build faith as you pass it on to your children.

Challenges for this week:
1. Take a look at your resources - from your material blessings like your house or your groceries, to your spiritual gifts like your ability to teach or encourage - and ask God to show you how you can better steward what He has given you.
2. Be intentional in the way you include your children in day-to-day acts of service - give them ways to serve alongside of you and have casual, faith building conversations about those opportunities.
3. If you are not currently involved in serving others as a family, look for one thing your family can do in the next few weeks.  Pack a shoebox for Operation Christmas Child, buy a few extra groceries and drop them off at your local food pantry, bake cookies for someone who could use some encouragement.  And make a plan to serve together regularly.  

Update: by the time I finished this post, I agreed to host a little girl from Safe Families.  A few days later, they called to say they had found another home for her where she could stay with her sister.  As we talked about it together and with the girls, Matt and I had this strong sense that God was simply asking for our obedience.  For whatever reason, God in His Sovereignty knew that this was not the right time or opportunity.  God promises that He will not give us more than we can handle, and we can trust that as we seek to serve, He will always provide what we need.  So while yes, sometimes the cost is great, when we serve out of obedience, we can trust that God our Provider will pick up the tab.