To Love and Serve... (Newsletter Piece)

I’ll start with a story...well maybe two or four.

18 years ago, a day or two after we arrived back in Atikokan with newborn Sarah there was a knock at the back door. A friend (daughter of an Anglican priest as it happens) was standing there with three or four foil containers. “Here,” she said, “Shepherds Pie, Meatballs...” as she listed off what was in the containers. “Just have to be heated up.” What a great gift for new parents.

Story #2, just under a year later. We have been back in Atikokan for a day or two, with newborn Devyn this time. Some ladies from the UCW show up with a full meal for us to share. They did the same various other times for other members of the congregation, often at a time of bereavement. It was a part of how they understood their role within the community.

Story #3, 11 years ago. We have been in Grande Prairie for a day or so (also with a slightly older newborn at the time). Our furniture has not even arrived at the house yet. My dad and I return from buying supplies for the work we were trying to get done before said furniture arrived to find a couple members of M&P and the Board Chair at the house, dropping off baskets of food stuffs and envelopes with gift cards and such in them. Welcome to the community!

Story #4, many years, decades really, ago. A death happens in the family, my parents have to go away for the funeral but don’t want to take the kids. A call to one of our close friends and my sister and I have a place to stay (or maybe someone came to stay with us – details are a bit fuzzy).

Those are just some stories that come quickly to mind. I could tell many others. I bet many of you could tell the same sorts of stories about your lives. Sometimes you have been on the giving end, sometimes on the receiving end. In the end, it turns out that loving and serving others seems to come pretty naturally to people who live in community with each other.

In fact, I have a great deal of trouble imagining a community (religious or secular) where loving and serving others is not an active part of their story. I have talked to people who were not a part of such communities. I have heard stories where that love and service was not available. In fact for three years I worked at a place that existed to help the families where story #4 was not a possibility. Think of all the reasons you might nave needed emergency child care, or support when parenting was hard – and then ask what if nobody was around to help out. It made me realize how blessed I had been.

I grew up in a community that lived these words. The families supported each other, offered child care when it was needed, provided ears to listen when things went badly, celebrated life’s accomplishments together. We didn’t do it to prove we were living out a creedal statement, many of us did not even know the New Creed well enough at the time to know those words were in it. We did it because we were a community. We were, when you came right down to it, extended family.

In the 11 years I have been a part of this community I have seen love and service put into action repeatedly. Both within the congregation and in the wider community of Grande Prairie I have seen people who give of themselves for the benefit of others. Sometimes it is to benefit one individual, sometimes it is to benefit a larger group. And many times the love and service, the loving service, has been offered by people who did it automatically, who would not think it worth making a fuss about. Sometimes the small acts of love make such a big deal. The church (both this congregation and the wider church are full of people who offer such service simply because it is who they are – they live to serve.

Our next newsletter will have as its theme another phrase from the United Church Creed (aka the New Creed) – to seek justice and resist evil. I suggest that one flows from the other. Because we know what it means to love and serve each other we can be filled with a passion for justice. Because we know what it means to be loved and served and considered important we know it is important that all people get that same feeling. Because we offer and receive loving service we know that evil, those things that deny and work against love, needs to be resisted if we are to flourish as the Body of Christ.

I have said before that there is an old phrase about Stewardship. “Stewardship is everything we do after we say ‘I believe’” Loving and serving others is an act of faith, an act of stewardship. Thank you all for all they ways (big and small) that you have offered to your neighbours over the years. Thank you for all the ways you will do it in the future.

Have a blessed summer. (And since I am writing this in the middle of a heat wave remember to stay hydrated and keep cool!)
Gord