Opportunities to serve come when you make yourself available

My wife and daughters are helping a sister we know in canning sweet corn this morning. That sounds super not fun to me so I am glad to be at work but it is a wonderful opportunity for my wife to minister and support a fellow sister in Christ and for my daughters to serve someone else. It is also a great learning experience for them to gain a practical skill (canning). That sort of domestic knowledge is often dismissed among our cultured society but I am glad they are able to get their hands dirty a bit while serving another.

This sister is from a family that left the Amish and became Mennonite. In doing so they lost much of their community support structure. My wife made the offer “If you ever need help…” and that call for help came last night. Would that call have come if my wife had not made the offer? Probably not. How many Christians all around us need help today but have nowhere to turn? I have to admit I am not very forthcoming about offering myself to serve others. My wife is just the opposite, talking to anyone and offering to help them sincerely. When she asks “How are you?”, she actually wants to know how they are and when she offers to help she means it.

There are opportunities to serve others all around us but if we barricade ourselves in our homes (or in our churches) we will more often than not miss those opportunities. Perhaps it is something seemingly small like canning or perhaps it is something bigger. Whatever the case we will find opportunities to serve if we make ourselves available and make the offer. Ministry is not restricted to what happens between 11 and noon on Sunday. Every chance to serve someone else is an opportunity for ministry. I need to do more to make myself available to others because it has been my experience thus far that people who need to be helped and loved don’t know you are willing to help and love them if you don’t tell and show them.