What God's Been Teaching Me Series (Part 2): To Have a Servant's Heart

     Recently God's given me the joy in serving people. Whenever someone is in need and asks for help, I rarely say no.  Not because I can't say no, and feel obligated to say yes, but because the thought of being able to help someone actually excites me. Need help after getting shoulder surgery? I got you. Need someone to babysit? No problem. Need someone to help lead a new youth group? I'm your girl. Need help getting ready for a baby shower? I'm there. (<--- Real life examples on how I'm currently serving people in my church.) If you're schedule is relatively empty, maybe your not realizing the full potential of what God wants you to be doing. I know in the past if someone had asked me to do something after I had been working, I'd be more reluctant, so to have this feeling of joy with no negativity is so freeing.
       I was going to just end the blogpost there but I feel prompted to share this story. So one of the first weeks at the Special Needs summer camp I am working at one of my staff members asked me if I could help her lift one of the kids out of her wheelchair,  I accepted right away not even having a thought in my mind of saying no. Especially at a job like this, it's very important that we help each other out.  She told me she was so relieved because everyone she asked told her they wouldn't do it. Hearing that made me angry, and I told her to tell one of our camp directors, which she ended up not doing. (This is the only incident at camp that I've heard of like this, so I think it must of been an off day.) For some reason writing this made me think of another situation I don't know why I'm sharing (About to get deep....maybe).
        When people don't help you out it's really frustrating. Which leads me to high school gym class (super cringe). We were doing kind of like a gymnastics unit.  So you needed to do these poses alone and with 1 or more other people. (Not having a friend in that class was so brutal). I asked group after group if I could join them, and even though I could have they said no. Being rejected multiple times in a row when you really need help is so brutal too, I wouldn't have cared but it was for a grade. An actual gym class you could fail. (Whenever someone talks about their gym classes they always seem so nice and easy, but this one was not. We had like boot camp style warm-ups for 40 minutes before we started the actual activity we'd be doing that day.) I remember breaking down in front of that teacher after getting so frustrated. (All the gym teachers I've had have never seemed to like me so she wasn't much of a help.) A few classes later the popular kids had gotten all the poses done, and were literally just standing around talking even though the gym teacher told them they could get extra credit if they helped people do poses who hadn't completed them yet. One of the girls not apart of the "popular" crowd helped me complete some of the poses she had already done, then talked badly about the "popular" crowd for being so stuck up that people like me not apart of the "popular" crowd were treated like literal trash. People no matter how different they are to you deserve to be loved and cared for.
        I'm so glad that the popularity thing vanished after high school.  Too much was based on how popular you were, and not how you were as a person which causes so much unnecessary insecurity. I'm not calling out the people who are too busy to help out or the ones who say no for a personal reason. I'm talking about those who blatantly don't help because they don't want to or because of the person they see you as. God is a giving God, and all those times you care for someone in need, God rewards you more. I'm not doing this for the reward, I'm doing this because I genuinely love serving people. Serving others= Serving God.