To Serve, To be Spent

A life well lived, is a life well spent

I only have love to give. I only have to love to share because it is only love that I have been asked to provide. And this love I am asked to give is not my own but a manifestation of the God I serve, working in and through me. The love I have for others is not something I can produce in and of myself but derives from the deep well that is Jesus Christ. It is alive and moving. Love does. Therefore, it’s not a stretch to see how I am to love people: it is by serving them. I’ll ask, “how can I be a better addition to someone’s life? How can I encourage them? How can I spend my money, time, and emotional energy on them? How am I intentional with them? When am I placing others’ needs above my own?” We are called, no, commanded to love people. It is what Jesus requires.

Philip Yancey says, “By ascending, Jesus took the risk of being forgotten.” I think about that often. That Jesus trusted God the Father enough to let go of the humans He had spent His entire ministry loving on. His service was, in many ways, misunderstood, and then He left. Is this our plight? My life is to be spent serving God, but I do that by serving people. My life is not my own and, therefore, can be, and will be, used for the sake of God’s glory. I cannot spend time being worried about misunderstandings or if I “like” certain people or not. My life is to be spent on people. That’s the challenge. That’s the difficulty! That’s where trust has to come in. Am I able to spend my life on behalf of someone else? Is this the right way to spend my life? Are you sure, God?

And we are again thrust back into the conversation we had a month ago. Do we trust God? Do we trust His way? From scripture, I can gather that God loves us, that God is in control of the Universe, and that God is asking us to surrender our lives to pick up His. Aside from the various atrocities of “Christ-followers” through the ages, this reality has to be one of the highest offenses Christianity offers. A God that asks us to abandon ourselves, in faith, that He will use our lives in a far better way than we could ever decide on our own? That’s hard. To be used, serving people- some of whom will never even acknowledge our role- is all the more complex. But this is the task. To move the existential question of “how should my life be spent?” to “for whom should my life be spent?”

-Louis