Service With a Smile
Sue Andraeas
“Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of
their master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of
her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God,
till He have mercy upon us.”
Psalm 123:2 (RSV)
Service. This is the discipline we seem to understand the best, and the one we can ‘do’ the most. There’s not a single member of the Saint Brendan’s fellowship who isn’t involved in some kind of service either within their church, or volunteer work in their community, or to their family! I was wondering why, then, is it considered a discipline if it’s so easy. And why can it lead to such harm; burn out, exhaustion, depression, compassion fatigue, and the like? There must be something I’m missing.
Prayerful pondering for ‘service discernment’ has been the fod-der for my meditations for the past month. Not that I’ve had a lot of time for meditation! Let me state that more accurately: not that I’ve made much time for meditation lately. Yes, that is a confession. With Alan back to full-time work at the post office (until the beginning of August), the gar-den in full swing, chapel construction moving forward (and me here alone which makes me the fore-man), continuing education for our puppy Baily, and 434 bales of hay put in the barn in the past 2 weeks…meditation time seemed luxurious. I was wrong. Once again, my blunders through lay monastic life have become my teacher. And, once again, I advise you to do as I say and not as I do or as I did.
The dictionary I looked at had seven definitions for ‘service’ as a noun, seven as an adjective, and four as a verb. They covered everything from ‘helpful activity’ to ‘supplying maintenance and repair’ to the ‘breeding of livestock.’ Interesting. In every case, what they all seemed to have in common is that some-thing was being used somehow to benefit someone.
Something/someone was being the servee (receiving the service), and something/someone was being the server (doing the service). What none of the definitions even remotely hinted at was WHY the something was being done in the first place! But, in my brief moments of meditation, it seemed to me that the motive for doing the service seemed more important than the what, the how, or even the to whom. So I decided to let my ‘imaginative prayer’ explore this question more fully.
I began thinking about the ‘server’ of the service the servant. I tried to think of movies or TV shows where there were masters and servants, and one immediately came to mind: Samwise Gamgee of J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Whether you know him from the books or from the movies, I’m sure you recognize that Sam (Frodo Baggins’ trusty sidekick) epitomizes true servanthood. Sam thinks only of his master’s wellbeing. And even when Master Frodo’s wishes are downright wrong (like the time he incorrectly thinks Sam is plotting some deviant scheme and sends him away at a time when Frodo most needs his help) Sam is obedient. The best proof of Sam’s self-denial comes at a key point in their voyage when it becomes apparent that Frodo needs to make his treacherous trek without his warriors and body guards. He explains to Sam that he is continuing his quest alone and Sam replies, “Of course you are going alone and I am going with you!” True servanthood, as Samwise so perfectly portrays, requires total denial of self and total awareness of the one being served. Service, as it turns out, is not simply ‘doing good deeds.’ It requires that we first give up our rights to ourselves. Service is done by servants, not masters.
As I continued to ponder this discipline of service, I was shingling the chapel. Actually, I was deshingling the chapel! If you’ve never put cedar shingles on anything, let me give you a quick primer: it’s a lot of rectangles of wood that are thicker on the bottom and paper-thin on the top. The trick is to put them on a vertical wall, with the bottom edge of the row being perfectly aligned (and aligned to WHAT varies from row to row—sometimes to each other, sometimes to a window, sometimes to some odd measurement so that the next row aligns with a window), and none of the gaps between shingles can line up with a gap in the previous row. Easy concept to grasp. Tough to stay focused on row after row, on a ladder, in the heat and bugs. Easy to get off course. So I was ripping five rows of crooked shingles from the wall and muttering to God about the sloppiness of the man we hired to do the job (he’s doing much better on other walls!!) while swatting mosquitoes and trying to keep Baily the Wonder Mutt from ‘herding’ chickens. I was thinking about how a hammer makes a lousy mosquito swatter (experience talking there), and that a pry bar is better for removing nails than a hammer is
(although it is almost as bad for swatting mosquitoes); about how we have a ‘tea service’ but not a ‘coffee service’ and why that might be, and why we don’t have a ‘wrench service’ or a ‘screwdriver service.’ (It probably has something to do with the elite of the British Empire and their servants, but…another day.) I was thinking about how, when serving the Lord (which should be done with gladness) I so often found it to be much like work and was not very glad to be doing it. (Why is that?) And, finally, I was thinking about our term “Worship Service” and thinking about who was being served, realizing that much of the time, WE are being served. So…whom are we worshiping? And this is when things began to come together.
In Celtic monasticism, the primary teaching—when it comes to relating to others—is to see Christ in every-one, friend and stranger. See Christ in your family, in your friends, in your colleagues, even in your enemies. Look for the image of Christ in them. But more importantly, serve Christ as you serve them. So whether you are doing some great deed, as Samwise Gamgee was, or you are washing yet another sink of dishes, or checking the motor oil and other fluids in your spouse’s car yet again, you are (as a Christian) to be doing it as unto Christ. Catherine Doherty, in her wonderful book The People of the Towel and Water, mentions how we, as Christians, are very quick to volunteer our service to some great evangelical work, and then find ourselves mending sheets or cleaning toilets, and we feel we are no use
to God because we are doing such menial things. Her explanation is that we are more concerned about our image than we are in serving our Lord and Master. If we were thinking about Him rather than self, the work we are asked to do would be irrelevant; being in His service in any capacity would be enough. If we are disgruntled with the work God has called us to do, then the WHY of our service becomes evident. We wanted to do something that makes us look good! We are being self serving.
Sometimes the work we want to do is not the work we were designed to do. And this may be true even if our natural, earthly gifts lie in that area! This is a tough concept to grasp. Alan is learning it this year. He is the most naturally gifted administrator I know, especially when it comes to making sense of the military and federal government’s administrative insanity! Even so, he is not called by God to do that work anymore. He’s doing a great job at the post office, but it is robbing him of all his energy, his time, his health and his joy. Think of it this way. A butter knife is great for many kitchen tasks, but it makes a lousy screw driver. Have you ever tried to use it in that capacity? A nice, heavy hammer is great on nails—until the nail is beside a window pane and your aim is less than perfect. Samwise Gamgee was called to serve Frodo through an epic task. Once it was done, he was not allowed to continue to serve Frodo, but was sent back to his home to his wife and children and community.
Stress, burn-out, and compassion fatigue are not so much the result of the work load but from doing a task we were not called by God to door maybe we are doing the right task but with the wrong motive. And Who decides what task we are called to do when? Our heavenly Master of course! The angels in heaven sing this line as part of a praise hymn to Christ: “You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God” (Revelation 5:10). For as long as I’ve been reading that passage of Scripture and it appears in a Canticle in Morning Prayer twice a week—I’ve only focused on how cool it is that God has drawn to Himself a kingdom of priests from all over the world. We ALL get to eat from the sacrifice at the altar; we all get to receive Communion! WHY???? In order to serve our God.
It’s not about us, my friends. It’s not even about each other. Church is not for us. Church service is not supposed to be directed at us. Fellowship, intercession, works yes! Those are ‘people-oriented’ disciplines! But our service is to be directed to God, and God alone. Or as St. Paul admonished the Colossian Church, “ And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him” (Colossians 3:17). In Psalm 100, the line ‘we
are His people, the sheep of His pasture’ is followed directly by ‘enter into his gates with thanksgiving.’ Why do sheep enter the temple? To be sacrificed! Servanthood begins here: grateful relinquishment of all rights to ourselves in joyful abandonment to the service of God.
That comes as close to a definition of ‘worship’ as any I’ve seen. Service must begin with, and end with, worship. They are inseparable. Service must be rendered only to our Master, Jesus Christ, as He comes to us in others. He does not ‘rent out’ his servants! Our service, whether from the pulpit or the kitchen sink, with a Bible in our hand or a mop, done in public or totally anonymously, must have one goal: it must glorify God. And the only way that can happen is if we are in close contact with God, through Jesus Christ. Service isn’t the easiest of disciplines. Quite the contrary! True service can only be done once we have learned to lay down our life, take up our cross, and follow Him! Make time for meditation. Make time to spend alone EVERY DAY with
your master, sitting at His feet, waiting on Him as a good servant would, fixing your eyes upon Him alone, just as the Psalm at the top of this article says. See what happens to your life of service and how it affects both your motivation and burn-out level. And let me know how it goes. I need to learn this one more than anyone else I know!
Sue Andraeas
their master, as the eyes of a maid to the hand of
her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God,
till He have mercy upon us.”
Psalm 123:2 (RSV)
Service. This is the discipline we seem to understand the best, and the one we can ‘do’ the most. There’s not a single member of the Saint Brendan’s fellowship who isn’t involved in some kind of service either within their church, or volunteer work in their community, or to their family! I was wondering why, then, is it considered a discipline if it’s so easy. And why can it lead to such harm; burn out, exhaustion, depression, compassion fatigue, and the like? There must be something I’m missing.
Prayerful pondering for ‘service discernment’ has been the fod-der for my meditations for the past month. Not that I’ve had a lot of time for meditation! Let me state that more accurately: not that I’ve made much time for meditation lately. Yes, that is a confession. With Alan back to full-time work at the post office (until the beginning of August), the gar-den in full swing, chapel construction moving forward (and me here alone which makes me the fore-man), continuing education for our puppy Baily, and 434 bales of hay put in the barn in the past 2 weeks…meditation time seemed luxurious. I was wrong. Once again, my blunders through lay monastic life have become my teacher. And, once again, I advise you to do as I say and not as I do or as I did.
The dictionary I looked at had seven definitions for ‘service’ as a noun, seven as an adjective, and four as a verb. They covered everything from ‘helpful activity’ to ‘supplying maintenance and repair’ to the ‘breeding of livestock.’ Interesting. In every case, what they all seemed to have in common is that some-thing was being used somehow to benefit someone.
Something/someone was being the servee (receiving the service), and something/someone was being the server (doing the service). What none of the definitions even remotely hinted at was WHY the something was being done in the first place! But, in my brief moments of meditation, it seemed to me that the motive for doing the service seemed more important than the what, the how, or even the to whom. So I decided to let my ‘imaginative prayer’ explore this question more fully.
I began thinking about the ‘server’ of the service the servant. I tried to think of movies or TV shows where there were masters and servants, and one immediately came to mind: Samwise Gamgee of J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Whether you know him from the books or from the movies, I’m sure you recognize that Sam (Frodo Baggins’ trusty sidekick) epitomizes true servanthood. Sam thinks only of his master’s wellbeing. And even when Master Frodo’s wishes are downright wrong (like the time he incorrectly thinks Sam is plotting some deviant scheme and sends him away at a time when Frodo most needs his help) Sam is obedient. The best proof of Sam’s self-denial comes at a key point in their voyage when it becomes apparent that Frodo needs to make his treacherous trek without his warriors and body guards. He explains to Sam that he is continuing his quest alone and Sam replies, “Of course you are going alone and I am going with you!” True servanthood, as Samwise so perfectly portrays, requires total denial of self and total awareness of the one being served. Service, as it turns out, is not simply ‘doing good deeds.’ It requires that we first give up our rights to ourselves. Service is done by servants, not masters.
As I continued to ponder this discipline of service, I was shingling the chapel. Actually, I was deshingling the chapel! If you’ve never put cedar shingles on anything, let me give you a quick primer: it’s a lot of rectangles of wood that are thicker on the bottom and paper-thin on the top. The trick is to put them on a vertical wall, with the bottom edge of the row being perfectly aligned (and aligned to WHAT varies from row to row—sometimes to each other, sometimes to a window, sometimes to some odd measurement so that the next row aligns with a window), and none of the gaps between shingles can line up with a gap in the previous row. Easy concept to grasp. Tough to stay focused on row after row, on a ladder, in the heat and bugs. Easy to get off course. So I was ripping five rows of crooked shingles from the wall and muttering to God about the sloppiness of the man we hired to do the job (he’s doing much better on other walls!!) while swatting mosquitoes and trying to keep Baily the Wonder Mutt from ‘herding’ chickens. I was thinking about how a hammer makes a lousy mosquito swatter (experience talking there), and that a pry bar is better for removing nails than a hammer is
(although it is almost as bad for swatting mosquitoes); about how we have a ‘tea service’ but not a ‘coffee service’ and why that might be, and why we don’t have a ‘wrench service’ or a ‘screwdriver service.’ (It probably has something to do with the elite of the British Empire and their servants, but…another day.) I was thinking about how, when serving the Lord (which should be done with gladness) I so often found it to be much like work and was not very glad to be doing it. (Why is that?) And, finally, I was thinking about our term “Worship Service” and thinking about who was being served, realizing that much of the time, WE are being served. So…whom are we worshiping? And this is when things began to come together.
In Celtic monasticism, the primary teaching—when it comes to relating to others—is to see Christ in every-one, friend and stranger. See Christ in your family, in your friends, in your colleagues, even in your enemies. Look for the image of Christ in them. But more importantly, serve Christ as you serve them. So whether you are doing some great deed, as Samwise Gamgee was, or you are washing yet another sink of dishes, or checking the motor oil and other fluids in your spouse’s car yet again, you are (as a Christian) to be doing it as unto Christ. Catherine Doherty, in her wonderful book The People of the Towel and Water, mentions how we, as Christians, are very quick to volunteer our service to some great evangelical work, and then find ourselves mending sheets or cleaning toilets, and we feel we are no use
to God because we are doing such menial things. Her explanation is that we are more concerned about our image than we are in serving our Lord and Master. If we were thinking about Him rather than self, the work we are asked to do would be irrelevant; being in His service in any capacity would be enough. If we are disgruntled with the work God has called us to do, then the WHY of our service becomes evident. We wanted to do something that makes us look good! We are being self serving.
Sometimes the work we want to do is not the work we were designed to do. And this may be true even if our natural, earthly gifts lie in that area! This is a tough concept to grasp. Alan is learning it this year. He is the most naturally gifted administrator I know, especially when it comes to making sense of the military and federal government’s administrative insanity! Even so, he is not called by God to do that work anymore. He’s doing a great job at the post office, but it is robbing him of all his energy, his time, his health and his joy. Think of it this way. A butter knife is great for many kitchen tasks, but it makes a lousy screw driver. Have you ever tried to use it in that capacity? A nice, heavy hammer is great on nails—until the nail is beside a window pane and your aim is less than perfect. Samwise Gamgee was called to serve Frodo through an epic task. Once it was done, he was not allowed to continue to serve Frodo, but was sent back to his home to his wife and children and community.
Stress, burn-out, and compassion fatigue are not so much the result of the work load but from doing a task we were not called by God to door maybe we are doing the right task but with the wrong motive. And Who decides what task we are called to do when? Our heavenly Master of course! The angels in heaven sing this line as part of a praise hymn to Christ: “You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God” (Revelation 5:10). For as long as I’ve been reading that passage of Scripture and it appears in a Canticle in Morning Prayer twice a week—I’ve only focused on how cool it is that God has drawn to Himself a kingdom of priests from all over the world. We ALL get to eat from the sacrifice at the altar; we all get to receive Communion! WHY???? In order to serve our God.
It’s not about us, my friends. It’s not even about each other. Church is not for us. Church service is not supposed to be directed at us. Fellowship, intercession, works yes! Those are ‘people-oriented’ disciplines! But our service is to be directed to God, and God alone. Or as St. Paul admonished the Colossian Church, “ And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him” (Colossians 3:17). In Psalm 100, the line ‘we
are His people, the sheep of His pasture’ is followed directly by ‘enter into his gates with thanksgiving.’ Why do sheep enter the temple? To be sacrificed! Servanthood begins here: grateful relinquishment of all rights to ourselves in joyful abandonment to the service of God.
That comes as close to a definition of ‘worship’ as any I’ve seen. Service must begin with, and end with, worship. They are inseparable. Service must be rendered only to our Master, Jesus Christ, as He comes to us in others. He does not ‘rent out’ his servants! Our service, whether from the pulpit or the kitchen sink, with a Bible in our hand or a mop, done in public or totally anonymously, must have one goal: it must glorify God. And the only way that can happen is if we are in close contact with God, through Jesus Christ. Service isn’t the easiest of disciplines. Quite the contrary! True service can only be done once we have learned to lay down our life, take up our cross, and follow Him! Make time for meditation. Make time to spend alone EVERY DAY with
your master, sitting at His feet, waiting on Him as a good servant would, fixing your eyes upon Him alone, just as the Psalm at the top of this article says. See what happens to your life of service and how it affects both your motivation and burn-out level. And let me know how it goes. I need to learn this one more than anyone else I know!
Sue Andraeas