Yesterday was an incredible day! Hundreds of people hitting the streets all over the country to serve in the name of Jesus Christ. This is our second Big Serve Event on a Sunday. Partnering together with another local church, this year it was interesting that many other churches across the country had similar serve events on the same weekend or same Sunday.
We worshiped on the hill and continued talking about where Christ was leading us. What is our Destination and who is leading us? Dancing with the Stars is one of the latest phenomenons from the world of reality television. I don't know very much about dancing, especially of the ballroom variety, but I know that it is critical for their to be a leader and one who follows. For us to be the kind of followers of Jesus that we are called to be we have to be willing to dance with Jesus, the ultimate leader! When we surrender to His lead we dance in perfect union toward a destination of eternal significance.
We have recently invested significant time looking into our spiritual DNA. For our purposes we have defined five key markers from scripture. Things that should spill out of all followers of Christ. Those five key markers are worship, studying, serving, giving, and sharing.
A couple times each year we participate in church-wide serve events to introduce the idea of serving becoming as natural as breathing for Christ followers. Our hope is that serving will trickle down from the church-wide events, to LIFE groups serving together, to individuals with servant eyes looking for ways to serve as much as they look to breathe.
It is somewhat frustrating to know that a significant number of the faithful weekend attenders, intentionally choose not to attend on Big Serve Sundays, but it is their loss. For those that choose to participate they experience a wonderful adventure of making a difference. Those serving often receive as much or more blessing than those that they are being served. It is a model from Jesus. He said of himself that the "Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve". Several of the organizations served talked of the thousands of dollars saved by their ministry because of not having to hire help to do what hundreds of volunteers do in one Sunday afternoon. Other volunteers are blessed to have the opportunity to serve individuals instead of organizations.
This year several ladies went to a nursing home to do make-overs and spa treatments for elderly residents. I love the pictures of women on their knees polishing finger nails and toes nails. It is as close to a modern day foot washing that I have seen. For some of the ladies it was the simple holding and massaging of their hands that brought smiles to their faces.
