Doing it for the church
Heart matters

Doing it for “the church”…

Chris and I often find ourselves meandering from one big church event to another, while trying to keep our family alive on all the days in between. We are actively involved at our local church and we attend church related activities twice or thrice a week. The other day my dear ol’ Hubstopher said to me: “We need to stop being so busy!” And that’s when I pointed and laughed, as my smartphone lingo suggests: rolling on the floor and laughing my butt off (how does one even do this) at the mere thought of spending a single week in absolute peace and monotony. The truth is that we excel when we are being used. And not ‘used’ as in ‘married to a gold digger’ used. Used as in: available to serve and help. Doing it for “the church”, as some may suggest.

I know it can feel like a lot to someone else who doesn’t “get it”. In fact, I was once told: “oh, your Pastor must enjoy all this free help”. It made me cringe. I cringed not because my Pastor was called out on the fact that he has a wonderful team of volunteers who love serving for free. No, I cringed because someone was daft enough to think that we do this purely for a person.

We don’t help out at our church because we want to make a pastor or a leader happy. Actually, we don’t “do it for the church” at all. We help out at our local church because we want to serve God with our lives and our gifts and abilities.

And we serve God by assisting our local church (with our lives and our gifts and abilities) under the covering of a God-fearing Pastor. We serve by putting the needs of others first and by being mindful of the congregation. You know, we do it for the people who only come on a Sunday, when we’ve been here the whole week.

I see people complaining about their religious institutions on social media, quick to point out hungry children that could be fed with church offerings and destitute families that could be saved with church resources. That’s great. Your heart is maybe in the right place. So why don’t you do something about it? Our journeys are different, my friend. God may have called you to reach those on mission fields. And He may have called me to reach those who sit in pews on Sundays. Comparison is a thief.

Anyways, this was not what I wanted to talk about today. I’m not sure how it escalated this quickly. So take it as you read it. I know that the debate is rife. People have a lot of opinion about how much time and money you’re suppose to give to “the church”. But I’m not here for that.

I’m just here to say that if I had to re-evaluate where we are at and how we got here, I totally don’t regret my small attempt at sacrificing my comfort for someone elses. After all, Jesus did it too.

2 Comments

  • hopefulltreasures

    Love, love, love this! We have always been actively involved in whichever church we are apart of and have always loved it and seen it as a privilege. Now, my husband is almost done with his accreditation process with the Full Gospel church, and we are so looking forward to being a part of the leadership of a church, and working with volunteers who want to serve, because Jesus did! Megan xx

Leave a Reply