Don't wait - help needed!

As I get older, one of the common things I hear from friends and colleagues is "when I retire, I'll spend time doing charity work", and it's great to see so many people planning to put their time to helping the under-privileged.  In fact, many friends don't even wait for retirement - they already get themselves regularly involved in social work.

When my wife and I were young parents, we decided we would try to let our kids, and indeed ourselves, see that age and timing were not reasons to delay helping others.  We went on our first family mission trip when our kids were just 1 and 3, still in diapers and a pram!  I remember our teammates were mostly younger than we were, not yet married and with no kids, and one of them told us, I never thought it would be possible to go on a mission trip with infants, but you guys showed me it could be done.  Thanks!

Those encouraging words inspired me to continue bringing the kids with us on subsequent mission trips, knowing that if I could find the time and energy to do such work with 2 infants in tow, then surely I could do even more as they grew up.  And so we did - upping the difficulty level each time!  I must confess, that as the years passed, and the kids got more and more involved with school and so on, they accompany us less and less on these things.  But I trust that they remember the life lesson - there's no time like the present to start blessing others, and there's no need to wait!

Just yesterday, we brought a group of friends to the rental block where we've been serving for the past several years with our bread distribution.  Since it's Christmas time, we decided to bring Christmas presents, and spend a bit more time with those families which we have grown to know better over the years. 

As I've said before on this blog, we're not just distributing food - we're really distributing time and love!  One of the families we often visit has our photographs proudly displayed on their wall, right alongside their family photos.  This round, I was really touched when I visited a recently widowed lady, and I saw that a photo of my wife and me with her and her husband was also on her wall.  It really made the time we have spent building relations all worth it.

Many of these residents have tough lives - and small things can really make a big difference.  One of the residents is not very mobile, so he's stuck at home a lot, so we brought him a whole bunch of DVDs, and he was really happy!  For those of us lucky enough to have Singtel Mio or Starhub or Netflix, having TV content is a given, but for him, it's a big deal!  Another resident was feeling the blues over his nephew who had been living with him and recently passed away after an accident, and I was glad to be there to give a big long hug and a prayer to let him know everything was going to be OK.

The end-of-year period sees many people, including myself, going off on holidays, often with family.  I am reminded that not everyone has the privilege of doing so, and that I can do something about that.  So - a loaf of bread, some old DVDs, a simple hug and simply, some of my time - these are things that anyone can do.  And that I can do now, without waiting for retirement!

My wife recently told me about an old friend of hers, who has 5 kids (five!!), and deliberately chooses to serve her church and community above and beyond what she and her family can do.  They do ask themselves - surely God can use a family that has only 4 kids, or 3, or 2, or 1, or maybe a young couple with more time and energy, or even an older couple whose kids have grown up and are independent.  Why us?  But they choose to take up the privilege of serving, to their credit and their great reward. 

May my family and I learn to have this attitude of service!  If, as part of your 2019 resolutions, you'd like to join me on this journey, just drop me a line :)  A very blessed Christmas to you and your loved ones!

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send?  And who will go for us?"  And I said, "Here am I.  Send me!"  Isaiah 6:8

 The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.  Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.  Matthew 9:37-38

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bullying? Stand up!

Image
When I was a kid, I remember being bullied a fair bit.  I was small for my age, bespectacled, shy.    The teachers didn't help by putting a target on my back by making me Vice Head Prefect.  I would get my stuff just taken away from me by bigger kids, dragged out into the field to be tickled until I collapsed (much less fun than it sounds), and pushed into the storm drains.  Not all the kids were full-blown bullies of course.  But I remember some of them standing by, and politely holding my spectacles (so they wouldn't be broken) while the bullies did their work on me. Most of this stopped when I got to secondary school, where a much larger proportion of my fellow students were now just as nerdy!  And of course I grew up too.  I don't really look back on those days with any kind of animosity, because I think it never occurred to me that it was unusual.  But I do think my experience made me a bit more sympathetic about people around me who...
Read more

Life as a pie chart

Image
Someone told me recently about a "life exercise" in which one compiles all the stuff that makes up your life, and puts it in a pie chart.  So let's say for me, something like this. The idea is to visually demonstrate to myself that, in the event I lose one of these things, then I can see that, hey life is not so bad, that wasn't such a big deal.  Say for example, if I suffered a blown ACL, and couldn't run or play basketball any more, like this: At first blush - I'd say, hey, I still have my wife, children, parents, career, church life - so, chin up, things are not so bad.  Pretty good life visualisation tool to bring some optimism back into play! ... But what if, a month later, something happens at work, and boom, career gets sidetracked, I lose my job, or get put in cold storage somewhere, like this: Oops, now only half my life is left!  With only half of life's meaning left to me, what do I do? And what if something happens to...
Read more

Family AND Team

Image
I heard an interesting viewpoint this weekend. A family is not inherently a team. Hmm.  Sometimes at work, often in church, and most of the time at home, you hear people say to each other that we are family. And often, we really are. We care for each other above and beyond transactional matters.  It matters to me when my colleagues and cell group members (and of course my actual family members) go through illnesses or family issues or work challenges. I root for their success at presentations and projects and relationships. I care about what they care about, even if it has little direct impact on my own life. In a way, a family is sort of an amalgam of people who support each other in pursuit of each member's personal goals. For example, as a father, I support my children in their academic, career and ministry goals. But where they go to school, the grades they get, and the careers and ministries they build - they're really their goals, not mine.  Ditto for my role as a c...
Read more