A Call To Serve Ministries of Iowa

Blessings to you in the New Year!  I hope you and your loved ones finished 2009 on a high note and have experienced a great start to 2010.

Between Christmas and New Year’s I got the opportunity to go on a mission trip down to Mexico with Mission Walk International.  It was a great experience, one magnified by being able to do it with my wife and two children.  There is something about serving as a family that makes the experience extra special.

We worked with the team from Mission Walk to transport, sort, deliver, and distribute Christmas gifts to children in Reynosa, Mexico.  Working with local resources, churches, and children’s homes, Mission Walk takes pictures of each child, catalogs what each child wants as a gift, and works to match each child with a US family who will purchase and wrap a gift for them.  They transport all of these gifts from the Midwest down to Mission, Texas, and subsequently take them over the border daily for three weeks.

A couple of things that impress me with each visit to deliver gifts.  Children and families will show up to the church an hour or more early on the day we’re coming.  On top of that, the kids will sit patiently for 5-15 minutes until all the youth have gifts BEFORE opening their own.  Lastly, for many of the children (and especially the parents) the photo with the gift is just as big of a present as the gift itself.  And for those that received family pictures from their US gift givers, they smiled at a chance to “meet” their brothers and sisters in Christ 1300 miles away.

As heartwarming as this experience is, it also makes you realize how many little things we take for granted.  Sanitary living conditions.  Internet access. Public bathrooms. Paved roads.  Regular garbage pickup.  Storm sewers.  Shoes.  A Bible of your own. 

I walked away from the experience with three main reinforcements:

1. Our brothers and sisters in Christ don’t always live inside the borders of our city, county, state, or country.   In Luke 10:29 Jesus was asked “Who is my neighbor?”  and he provided  the parable of the Good Samaritan.  His point was that everyone is our neighbor, but sometimes we only look at that in context to where we reside.  Yes, we need to serve where we are, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we should consider those with needs outside our communities as “someone else’s” neighbor.  For 2010… serve where you are, but be willing to change where you’ll “be”.
2. Service is ultimately an act of love born out of a growing relationship with those you are serving and with God.  Without God, service is selfish and usually driven by a need to feel necessary.  Without a relationship with those you are assisting, service is work done outside your “day job” on someone else’s behalf.  Servant-hearted love is the fruit of these growing relationships with God and your neighbor and a natural extension of the growth going on inside you.  For 2010… Build stronger relationships with your current neighbors, neighbors you don’t know, and with God by spending time with them; service will naturally flow from this.
3. The power and importance of the Bible is sometimes lost on those who have access to it every day.  A Pastor we visited explained how great their need was for Spanish Bibles for those they were shepherding and in many cases, bringing to Christ.  For many of us, a bible, even for the unbeliever, is within easy reach (or a click away on the Internet).  But those he was serving have little or no access to a bible of their own.  For 2010…help spread the Good News to all of God’s people, wherever they are, in whatever way you can.

As we approach the 2010 resolution season, let us resolve to focus on how we serve and realize that the "how" and the "who" are usually more important than the "what" and the "when."