Becoming a Servant in a Serve-Me World

Today I’m writing about another ‘backlist’ title. (That’s publisher speak for a book which is no longer ‘new’.) It’s great to talk about the new books coming along, but there are lots of real gems which are easy to forget with all the hoopla surrounding the new ones.

Today’s choice is The Outward Focused Life, and it’s about expressing a ‘doing faith’, not simply a ‘believing, static faith’. Let me share a bit of it with you.

“For years I’ve held on to a letter that reminds me of what’s really important. A woman wrote to me:

We live on a busy street. There are lots of kids who ride by our house on their bikes. I am probably overly protective of my children because I don’t want them to get in with the wrong crowd. Perhaps not a very Christlike move on my part, but I feel I need to protect them. There is a little girl who rides around here named Annie. I have had to talk to her before, because she turns our water spigot on until she has made a mudhole of our yard. She is always dirty, and I, ashamedly so, hate to see her coming. [My six-year-old daughter] Becky was outside playing today, and her older sister came inside to tell on her. Becky was playing with Annie. I told my older daughter to ask Becky to come inside for a minute. I asked Becky why she was playing with Annie.

She said, “Mom, I am playing with her because she has no friends. She rides by here every day by herself and never has anybody with her. I thought that I would not like to have to ride my bike alone all day, so I asked her if I could be her friend. She is sitting out on our porch right now waiting for me. Can I go back out and play with her?”

I was dumbfounded. I get so wrapped up in what I am doing and in trying to raise good kids that I forget what God wants us to be doing. I took a Popsicle out to Annie, and she thanked me and smiled the prettiest little smile through that dirty face. Then I thought of that verse about “whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”

This letter makes me think about what’s really important in my life. And maybe I should stop asking, “What’s important?” and start asking “Who’s important?” “Who” is always more important than “What.” The question all of us have to ask is, “How important to us are people who don’t yet know Jesus?” There are adults who ride their bikes past the doors of our churches each day and don’t know that Jesus – the friend of sinners – is their friend. They have dirty lives and play in dirty mudholes, and we, the church, have all the Popsicles.

We just need to step off the porch and ask them if they’ll be our friend.