Have Cheap Luggage, Will Travel

Bird poop and service

Lately, I have been volunteering through with my church in downtown Dallas by partnering with a church that has literally transformed the crime rate in their area by buying buildings that used to be crack houses and turning them into ministries like half way houses and pregnancy centers. All this with a staff of 2 people. Very cool stuff.

When I have gone down there to volunteer, I have meet people that are incredibly receptive to hearing about Christianity and people that are much nicer to strangers that I ever am. Interacting with these people has really changed me personally and I have become addicted to serving because it is somewhat of a high. Everyday I see that the Lord is after balance in my life because I recently saw that my service for the Lord isn’t always going to be such a fairy tale.

In my latest trip to volunteer for the downtown church, we were painting some houses in the neighborhood that the pastor had started making relationships with. The houses were old and we had to scrape several layers of paint off before we could put some new paint on them. The girl I was working with was up on a ladder which was broken so I had to stand underneath it to brace it. We got to a spot that apparently birds loved to roost on because it was caked with bird poop. So she had to scrape off the bird poop and since I was bracing the ladder, it was coming down on me. As I was getting showered with little flecks of dried bird poop, I thought what a different experience this was for me as opposed to the other times.

The true heart of local missions is finding a way to really connect with somebody on a regular basis to be Jesus to them and the best person in this situation to be that for the people in these houses was not me but the pastor of that church. My service was allowing him to become closer to the lost in his neighborhood.

So service can change you but it isn’t all about you. It took a shower of dried bird poop to teach me that.