Service

Last week we had the opportunity as a family to offer some service to our community. We have an organization called Family Bridges that provides temporary housing for homeless families with children. They spend their days at a house here in Hillsboro where each family has a private room and then probably due to insurance reasons, spend the night at various churches in the area. Our help was needed hosting dinner at one of these churches, so that is what we did. We got there at 5pm, got signed in and prepared for dinner. There were only two families with us that night. One had a little girl who is 5 and Annalina and Joseph had fun playing with her. She was a sweet girl and her mother was very nice. The other family had two teens and did not speak to us much, but I can understand that it must be hard to be in that situation and have to deal with so many people they do not know. We brought along a game and played it with out little friend and Adrienne played games with them too. We stayed until 8pm when the night host arrived. We took our kids and the little girl out on the church playground, but shortly before we left Annalina got a doozy of a splinter in her finger and was miserable until we got her home. I could not find tweezers or anything to help get it out there so we soaked her in the tub when we got home and I got it out.

It was an interesting evening, though at times a little awkward. I am so glad we were able to do it. I hope we can do it again sometime. It was a real eye opener to realize that there is such a need in our area. I kept thinking how little it would really take to end up in a similar situation and I feel gratitude for this organization who provides food and a place to stay for these families while they try to line up work and shelter for themselves. I doubt our being there really meant much to the families who were there, but I believe that often service is more about ourselves than those we are serving. Service helps us be better people, to learn to see things differently, and to learn to love those we are in service to as Christ loved and served while he was here on earth!

I have reflected a lot this past week on service and what it means to me and how it affects me. I have a friend and every time I offer to help her with anything at all, she always turns me down saying she does not want to bother me and I really think she feels like a burden when others do things for her. It makes me feel a little sad, because I love her and would love nothing more than to help her out. It made me think of myself, and how often someone has offered to do something for me and I have said no, also not wanting to be a bother. Maybe in allowing others to serve us, we are actually serving them. Hmmmm......

So Megan just called me right after I typed in the above sentence, and we were talking about life in general when she said, "when we allow others to serve us, we are actually serving them". Isn't that crazy, just moments after I typed it, she said it and we weren't even talking about what I was blogging about! Wow, its like Megan is my twin who was just born 3 years after me!!