The Spirit of Christmas

Repost from Facebook Message to Legacy Student Ministry Group:

I have a few thoughts I'd like to share. I hope they are clear; I feel passionate about this, and when that is the case, and will sometimes leave things out or know what I'm trying to say but not express it properly.

I'm convinced more and more that the spirit of Christmas is really in loving and serving people. Jesus was born into an ordinary, perhaps relatively poor, family. Jesus was born in a feeding trough. In a barn. With his birth came a new law, where the greatest commandment is love in place of rules and regulations. At the height of his ministry, he was eating and hanging out with people who soaked up his love like a sponge. Often poor or otherwise unloved people. It is baffling, then, to think that the celebration of his arrival into our world is marked by gifts and largely, materialism.

Yuck.

I can think of at least a few better things to do to celebrate Christmas, some of which include volunteering. I know that not everyone is able to do the same things, has the same amount of time, or the same amount of money. But we are responsible for the choices that we make with the allotments we DO have.

A few ideas: drop change into those Salvation Army buckets. Be more considerate of people you come across and smile. Donate food. Or just take a little time to uncover a few volunteer opportunities. You may not have time or money to do as much as you want, or as much as someone else. Service cannot be a comparative thing; service is about the heart. Service is about love. Just like the parable about the 3 servants who were entrusted with different amounts of money, people are not identical and will not carry identical abilities. Do what you can with what you have. Strive to learn to love, and doing those things will pour out of you. But don't wait to learn to love to do them, because if you really want to learn, you will learn to love as you serve. And learn to serve as you love.

This is not (meant to be) a guilt trip. Just an encouragement to look outside yourself, look for needs, and follow our greatest commandment ( which is essentially love God and love others.)I have been learning a lot by looking at these ideas.

PS. If you're a female going to the brunch this Saturday, I'll be speaking more about what the arrival of Jesus means, and what we can do with that knowlege. I will also say that preparing to speak has given me a lot to think about.

My Clay is Still on the Wheel

There is something great about writing- it means I can look back and read about what I've learned, thought about, struggled through, and where I came out. It's beautiful; it's therapeutic.
It seems my ideas and goals are almost always in a slow but steady evolution. I like to read, discuss, analyze. And to tell the truth, I am almost never satisfied with the finished product- on those few occasions that I am, I quickly shift from satisfaction to looking for the next thing I can tweak.

One thing that has (slowly!) happened is that I am not afraid to fail. This is in large part due to my husband who encourages me to try anything I deem worthy of pursuing: writing, teaching, organizing a running club, event planning, organizing a group of service-oriented people. I often have big ideas- I had big dreams for the running club, and I wanted my service-project group to be "big," as well. But I think that it is possible that people weren't ready for it. And by that, I mean that hearts and minds weren't ready. Perhaps the timing was off.

It seems to me that any big undertaking that I attempt to install into the youth group on my own excitement, passion and power, will most likely fail. Legacy Student Ministry is not for me; it is for my kids. I am convinced that anything big and powerful that happens within the confines of student ministry will be most successful if it comes from the students, because that means internal change and movement, as opposed to the external that comes from me.

Summer will, of course, be full of retreats, service projects, youth group outings, and quite possibly, running on Sundays. But those are only activities (and good activities at that!). What I want and what I pray for my kids is hearts that burst with love, and the desire for the action which follows it, which is service.

It is easy for me to fixate on the choices I've made that could have been better, but the truth is, there is no benefit in that. I can choose to take life moment by moment and make the best choices I know how to make within each timeslot. Those choices will be imperfect, which I will learn with hindsight, but my hope is that I will keep moving forward, despite obstacles, confusion, and frustration.

It is hard for me to live without knowing what the "perfect" decisions are, but I do know that I am not a finished work and that God will be faithful to complete the work that he started in me. Truth be told, I am an impatient person, and I want that work to be completed NOW. I want to have arrived. I want to know all the answers in black and white.
But I'll continue to make the best choices I know how to make, and then I'll revise them as I go.