The whole concept of helping others, serving others, healing others, grew in me as a seed is placed in humus-rich soil, and begins pushing out roots, growing toward the sun.
As you can no doubt tell from previous chapters, I, unfortunately, hadn’t given this important facet of life a place of prominence in my day to day journey. It was hardly on my radar for many years.
I focused on raising my children and running a household. I homeschooled them and, since we lived out in the country, always had a large garden to plant and harvest, chickens to tend to, and horses to curry. We did sponsor children from Compassion, and after more than twenty years I still have a child I sponsor whose name is Kim, from the Philippines. I think I’ve sponsored about six different children over the years. It’s a wonderful organization doing God’s work.
The real transformation began back, again, in Arizona. Through those three books I mentioned before, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, by Don Miller, Outlive Your Life, by Max Lucado, and The Walk, by Richard Paul Evans, God opened for me a desire to be used for something – I suddenly wanted to be remembered for a legacy of service to others. Not how much money I’d earned or how big my house was or how nice my things were.
You must remember, I’m an introvert and being alone is what I prefer most of the time. Serving others meant I’d have to actually interact with people and open myself up to feeling their pain and possibly not maintaining that so-carefully-groomed emotional control. Life was going to get much more complicated.
I also consumed other books with similar ideas. Books like Radical by David Platt and Love Does, Bob Goff’s first book, and a book I’ve been quoting from, Brennan Manning’s The Furious Longing of God. As I read and meditated on them along with the scriptures, I was astounded at what I had been missing out on all these years.
While living in Arizona I became involved with Operation Christmas Child, a branch of Samaritan’s Purse, run by Franklin Graham, and enjoyed the opportunity to be part of such a Christ-centered organization helping children around the world. Franklin’s book Rebel With a Cause helped cement in me the importance of what our real purpose here is.
Once I moved back to Michigan, I was spending most of my time serving my parents, but once I landed a part-time retail job so I could continue to make my car payments, I was able to find ways to plant seeds of the Gospel there as I interacted with customers. Sometimes I would have only a minute or two, but I planted the seeds anyway, and prayed that God would bring the increase.
Things really gained momentum when God moved me to Florida and I found myself attending Northstar Church, an imperfect group of Believers whose focus is ‘helping the whole world find and follow Jesus’. They are dead serious about serving their community and I’ve learned a lot about selflessness and sacrifice during my sojourn here. Their constant example of self-giving has been inspiring.
Something else that changed how I see others happened when my son was sentenced to prison. I was suddenly forced to look at and interact with other prisoners when I’d go and visit my son every Saturday. The Spirit was whispering to my heart – ‘I see value in them. Look at them with my eyes.’
These two settings, becoming part of a local church who loves its community, and seeing prisoners from God’s perspective, effectively adjusted how I view the world. We are all broken, and we are all loved by God who sent Jesus to die for not just those of us who are only kind-of bad, but for the really bad. The Apostle John meant it when he penned these words that most of us know by heart: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16
He didn’t say ‘for God so loved the good people and the pretty good people and the people who keep their nose clean’. He said the world. That includes a whole host of goodness and badness.
So, you see, these were lessons I couldn’t learn in Arizona. I had to learn them in Florida – the perfect environment. I was drafted for a lead part in an epic drama and given my lines. I had to practice them over and over and become the character so that in the end the lines weren’t delivered by an actor, but by a true believer.
These next stories span many years. As I looked back on my life, there were things that happened I didn’t fully understand at the time, but now am able to clearly see the lesson behind the scene.
I’d like to end this introduction with a fairly lengthy passage from, once again, Brennan Manning’s masterpiece, The Furious Longing of God:
“Healing is a response to a crisis in the life of another person. It’s enough of a response, a satisfactory response to a crisis in the life of another. And wherever the word crisis is used in the Greek New Testament, it is translated in English as judgment. That’s right – judgment. Healing is a response that I make to a decisive moment in the life of a brother or sister; whether I respond or not, I have made a judgment.
Healing becomes the opportunity to pass off to another human being what I have received from the Lord Jesus; namely His unconditional acceptance of me as I am, not as I should be. He loves me whether in a state of grace or disgrace, whether I live up to the lofty expectations of His gospel or I don’t. He comes to me where I live and loves me as I am.
When I have passed that same reality on to another human being, the result most often has been the inner healing of their heart through the touch of my affirmation. To affirm a person is to see good in them that they cannot see in themselves and to repeat it in spite of appearances to the contrary. Please, this is not a Pollyanna optimism that is blind to the reality of evil, but rather like a fine radar system that is tuned in to the true, the good, and the beautiful. When a person is evoked for who she is, not who she is not, the most often result will be the inner healing of her heart through the touch of affirmation.” (pgs. 82-83)