Growing In Service

Growing in Service

[Jesus said,] “Whoever wants to be first among you must become your slave. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Matthew 20:27-28

Flo Perkins was a woman who loved the Lord so much that every morning at 5:30, before feeding the family or going to work, she knelt at the east window of her home. She called that her “trysting place,” an appointed meeting place for lovers, for Jesus was truly the Lover of her soul. As Flo launched her days from the trysting place, the little gray stucco house became a veritable lighthouse. She served the Lord through praise and prayer all day as she worked long, hard hours in the meat department and often cared for her grandchildren.

She finished only seventh grade before she had to go to work, but her study of the Bible bore good fruit. As she grew in Christ, she taught hundreds of people God’s Word in Sunday school and Bible studies. Flo also ministered to generations of neighborhood kids during her fifty years in that home, feeding them wisdom along with cookies and Popsicles. With homemade quilts, sacks of groceries, and money, Flo gave needy people life-sustaining prayer, Bibles, and the greatest gift of all—Jesus. She wasn’t in full-time ministry. She was an ordinary woman of small means with a family and a hard job at a local grocery store. But she served an extraordinary God and used all she had to serve others in his name.

Living a life of faith means being called to serve whether we are in college or our senior years, single or married, divorced or widowed, whatever color or background, whatever mistakes we’ve made. If you are a believer, God has given you talents and gifts, resources, and skills for the very purpose of serving him and others. I pray as you grow in service that the joy of the Lord will be your strength, just as it was my friend Flo’s until she entered heaven and heard the Lover of her soul say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant!” —CHERI

Lord, what can I do today to serve you? What have you given me that I could use for the good of others? Thank you for the way you do amazing things through ordinary people.

God is always calling on us to do the impossible. It helps me to remember that anything Jesus did during his life here on earth is something we should be able to do, too. —MADELEINE L’ENGLE (1918–2007), AMERICAN WRITER, POET, AND ESSAYIST