Service
How much of our lives is centered around ourselves? Not that we set out to make ourselves the center of everything, but it just ends up happening. We go to school to forward OUR career, we post on Instagram the perfectly filtered shot of our day.
But what if God didn’t design our lives to be about us? What if the hollow feeling that nags at us is because our hearts are pointed in the wrong direction: at ourselves.
We live in a broken, fractured world. What if one of the main reasons we are alive and walking around on this planet is to repair as many of cracks as possible?
If you dig into the Bible, you notice this pattern of when God get truly upset. It’s when the brokenness in the world is ignored. When the poor go hungry, those unable to defend themselves aren’t protected, and when people who can’t take care of themselves are left to suffer. Students often come to me looking for guidance. They say I just don’t know what God wants me to do with my life and I tell them I know! SERVE. Go help others. I’m not trying to be facetious but it’s true. There is also something amazing that happens when you serve. Do you want to experience God in a new and fresh way? Serve. God will join you in powerful ways you have never imagined. He will break your heart in good ways and reorder the pieces into something brand new and reoriented around something far more important and amazing than what you could of dreamed up.
So find a place to to serve. Look for places where brokenness is hidden and see if it’s a place that you have been called to help fix it. Serve at a homeless shelter, join a highway cleanup team, pack meals for hungry kids, raise money for wells in places with no clean water. There a million ways to join in God’s repairing of a broken world.
Here are a few tips when looking for a place to serve.
• Find people to serve that you can get to know. Serve at the homeless shelter but get out from behind the counter of food and sit and listen to someone’s story. It will heal the person talking and you the listener at the some time.
• Serve consistently. Pick a place to build relationships with the folks you are trying to help
• Understand what is broken in the system that keeps the people you serve oppressed and under unsolvable hardship and start to fight against it. There is a reason that God gave you the brain and skills he did and it’s not just to make yourself comfortable, it’s to take care of others with less ability to do the same.
• Bring others along. There is great power in a group of people mobilized to solve a problem. Once you find a spot to help others find other lost me monsters and help point them to something far more meaningful.
But what if God didn’t design our lives to be about us? What if the hollow feeling that nags at us is because our hearts are pointed in the wrong direction: at ourselves.
We live in a broken, fractured world. What if one of the main reasons we are alive and walking around on this planet is to repair as many of cracks as possible?
If you dig into the Bible, you notice this pattern of when God get truly upset. It’s when the brokenness in the world is ignored. When the poor go hungry, those unable to defend themselves aren’t protected, and when people who can’t take care of themselves are left to suffer. Students often come to me looking for guidance. They say I just don’t know what God wants me to do with my life and I tell them I know! SERVE. Go help others. I’m not trying to be facetious but it’s true. There is also something amazing that happens when you serve. Do you want to experience God in a new and fresh way? Serve. God will join you in powerful ways you have never imagined. He will break your heart in good ways and reorder the pieces into something brand new and reoriented around something far more important and amazing than what you could of dreamed up.
So find a place to to serve. Look for places where brokenness is hidden and see if it’s a place that you have been called to help fix it. Serve at a homeless shelter, join a highway cleanup team, pack meals for hungry kids, raise money for wells in places with no clean water. There a million ways to join in God’s repairing of a broken world.
Here are a few tips when looking for a place to serve.
• Find people to serve that you can get to know. Serve at the homeless shelter but get out from behind the counter of food and sit and listen to someone’s story. It will heal the person talking and you the listener at the some time.
• Serve consistently. Pick a place to build relationships with the folks you are trying to help
• Understand what is broken in the system that keeps the people you serve oppressed and under unsolvable hardship and start to fight against it. There is a reason that God gave you the brain and skills he did and it’s not just to make yourself comfortable, it’s to take care of others with less ability to do the same.
• Bring others along. There is great power in a group of people mobilized to solve a problem. Once you find a spot to help others find other lost me monsters and help point them to something far more meaningful.
- http://www.volunteermatch.org/ - find a place to help out!
- www.desiringgod.org/articles/serve-in-the-shadow-god-places-you