Photo credit to: dailyparakletos on Instagram
Serving With Your Life Group…or even Your Non-Life-Group!
During VBS this year, we had our Grade 7-8 kids pack lunches for homeless people that the office staff hand out at the door. While it has been a bit slower this month, it isn’t unusual to hand out 50 lunches in a week. As you can imagine, that is quite a bit of interruptive work. Orin Bailey and Muriel Harkness were fascinated by this ministry and peppered me with rapid fire questions:
1) Who normally packs these lunches? A: Staff/Willow
2) Who buys the food? A: Joanne Luck
3) How many do you use? A: Up to 50 a week
4) How come we didn’t know about this ministry? A: Hmmmm….complicated answer
5) What can we do to help? A: Get your Life Group involved
6) How come my Life Group hasn’t been involved? A: The 80/20 rule? Maybe?
7) What’s the best way to communicate these ideas to the church? A: I’m all ears! 🙂
Story Time!
Needless to say, within three weeks of this conversation, Muriel Harkness called me up and said, “My group is planning on packing lunches tonight. What do I need to do?”
Del Aasen came up to me on Sunday and said to me and a couple of other people, “Those lunches that Muriel got us to pack? You know it only cost $20 a family (with 5 families) to pack 25 lunches? I couldn’t believe all of the things that we could put in a lunch bag that would help feed people!!” At this point, I went and got one from my office so everyone could see inside it. Del said, “Look at that! It’s all good things to eat! How many have you handed out?”
I replied, “Before the end of the week, we had handed out all of them! All 25!”
Del confirmed, “Well, we need to do this again!”
Next Step
Serving other people for the sake of the Kingdom is life-changing! Once you have been inspired to serve your heart is filled with joy and love for God’s people. We were born to serve!
We need each of you to take some initiative to plan a service project with your group. We have many options available – some may take 1 whole day, or a ½ day or an hour! Don’t wait for someone else in your group to take the initiative, God has equipped you to do it yourself!
Darcy and I are willing to come to your group and share stories of service with you. We can provide you with a list of service project ideas to start your brainstorming process. We are also willing to do some ground work for you in terms of planning/shopping because we know that everyone is busy! If you aren’t in a life group but would like to join a team for service, please let us know and we will also coordinate that. We eagerly anticipate serving with you this coming year!
List of Service Opportunity Ideas to Start Brainstorming