Heart of a Servant

For 24 years, I have been an active servant in my church. 

I started as a youth group member who was there every time the doors opened, went on all the trips, stood in front of the congregation and gave the mission reports. I became the audio-visual technician, nearly every Sunday for almost six years. I was a member of the Vacation Bible School cast and an activity leader. I was the church webmaster and undertook a major redesign of our digital presence. More recently, I have monitored our livestream services. I tended the nursery. I taught a Sunday School class. I was a member of a small group, often leading some conversations therein. I worked with our benevolence ministry, providing funds to those in need.

I have spoken routinely for more than ten years, offering Communion devotionals or, as I like to say, setting the Table. I have prepare the Communion elements. I have cleaned them up. I have passed the plates, and I have stood at the doors to greet. I have coordinated the volunteers who do these things. I have preached one sermon. I have been part of the praise band and have even added vocals a few times here and there. 

For more than a decade, I changed the furnace filters in all 28 units in the building. I have replaced a couple of broken toilet parts and one faulty water valve. 

When I say that I have been an active servant in my church, I mean it. 

This stems from a servant's heart that God has put in me, well before I knew Him or the church. It's just the way I'm wired. 

As a young kid, outside of the church, I volunteered to deliver the fluoride treatments to the other students in the school. I worked in the library, shelving books and dusting shelves. I spent a good deal of my time in the essential skills classroom, helping the kids with greater physical and mental needs. I was out in the heat helping to build what we called the Friendship Bridge on the ground that separated my elementary school from the one next door, and I learned to lay block so I could help with the foundation for a historic one-room schoolhouse that was being moved to our grounds. 

If there is something to be done, I am wired to simply do it. I have always been this way. I rarely count the cost to myself. 

But...there is one. 

It's something I didn't realize or recognize or understand until very recently. Having been separated from my church now for almost 18 months (by force of medical realities), I'm not serving like I used to. There's not some task that I have to accomplish every Sunday, not something I am responsible for making happen. 

It took a long time being away, a long string of Sundays without duties for me to come to the realization that I did, but when I finally saw it, it broke my heart. It broke my servant's heart. 

See, yes, I have the heart of a servant; I always have, I always will. But somewhere along the way, that servant's heart led me straight down the path to a servant's faith. 

And that's not as good a thing as it sounds. 

*Stay tuned.