- Mark 9:35, NRSV
It's 3:15 AM and I can't seem to sleep. I wrote on this blog that I was tired after a long day last night before I went to bed. This was true but what often trumps my ability to fall off into sleep for the night is something weighing heavy on my heart and mind. This is indeed what has me up in the middle of the night now. So, I thought I would share it with you, my companion on this journey of faith and life. In order for you to understand what I'm talking about, I need to give you a little background.
Because Habitat for Humanity is considered a mortgage company we, of course, have to keep a lot of files. Each family with whom we work has a file that contains everything from their original application to copies of their closing documents. Obviously this information is confidential and we as the staff want to make sure that we guard families' privacy in every way that we can. One of the ways we do this is keep these filing cabinets locked when the staff are not in the office.
One of my jobs as the Family Services Coordinator is to make sure that these cabinets get unlocked when I arrive in the office in the morning and then locked again before I leave for the day. For whatever reason, this task has been a minor irritation to me. There are eight filing cabinets to lock and unlock each day and often times when I do it, I grumble to myself about it. I sometimes forget to do it and then I have to stop what I'm doing and unlock the cabinets in the morning. However, what seems to irritate me more is that I forget to lock the cabinets up at night and only remember that I need to do it as I'm rushing out the door at the end of the day. Then I have to put my stuff down and take the time to lock all of these cabinets. It doesn't take that long. It's not a hard task. It's that I forget and then I get irritated that I'm assigned this task. All of a sudden in my mind the cabinets are not the cabinets where we keep our family files, they are the STUPID cabinets where we keep our family files. What irritates me more is that I see the rest of my co-workers freely zipping off to their cars for the day as if they don't have a care in the world and I'm chained to task of locking the cabinets up before I go. Like the self-centered little boy that I too often am, I feel like this isn't fair.
Recently our Executive Director gave all of the Habitat office staff a survey to complete. On this survey was the question: "What one thing about your job would you like to change?" Of course, what immediately came to my mind was locking and unlocking the stupid cabinets. However, I didn't write that on my survey because I thought it sounded too petty and insignificant. Instead, the good martyr that I am, I decided I would suffer in silence with my appointed duty. However, I did everything but suffer in silence. I told more than one of my co-workers that I really wanted to answer this question on the staff survey by stating that I didn't like locking and unlocking the cabinets. In fact, in my often overly dramatic fashion I thought about responding by stating on the survey that the cabinets were evil and I wanted nothing to do with them. I then began justifying in my mind why me spending time to unlock and lock the cabinets is not a good stewardship of Habitat's resources. Instead, the task of locking and unlocking the cabinets should be assigned to someone else with the spiritual gift of locking and unlocking cabinets.
So, what seems to be weighing on my heart and mind at 3:00 AM is something I said to my supervisor before I left the office last night regarding my assigned task of unlocking and locking the cabinets. I know I partly spoke out of fatigue but that's no excuse and now it's really bugging me. I shared with her that I really hated to do this task because I thought it was beneath me. I said, "I have a masters degree and I shouldn't have to be bothered with such a menial task."
Well, as you might have guessed, I can't believe I said this. What in the heck was I thinking? How could I be so selfish and full of myself? Thinking that having a graduate degree somehow exempts me from mindless tasks in life is just plain stupid. It's not what I know to be true or what I say I believe. When I served as a local church pastor, I not afraid to roll up my sleeves and pitch in to help. I took out the trash, plunged toilets, and mopped floors. I understood that part of being a pastor and even more than this, part of being a follower of Christ is to be a servant. However, somewhere deep down inside me, there is some kind of selfish sense of entitlement that is irritated by having to unlock and lock these filing cabinets at the Habitat office each day.
I am embarrassed by this and feeling a bit ashamed of myself for feeling this way, but there it is - warts and all. I'm not nearly the servant that I like to think I am. I am flawed and selfish and arrogant and sinful and just plain stupid. I say that I seek to serve the poor through my position with Habitat for Humanity, yet within me is something that rebels against servanthood. In that moment of weakness when I expressed what I really felt to my supervisor, I was anything but Christ-like.
So, where do I go from here? Well, the only thing I know to do is to confess my sin and move forward in faith. I ask for God's forgiveness for this deep flaw in my character. I pray that God will help me to be more and more like Jesus and less about Kevin. I pray that from this experience I will be more humble and have the heart of a true servant of Christ. I pray that I will joyfully accept whatever tasks are assigned to me because in the end I know that they help to further the mission and ministry of Habitat for Humanity.
Along with this, I want to embrace the task of unlocking and locking the cabinets each day with a servant's heart and attitude. Each morning I unlock the cabinets, I hope it will remind me of the families who no longer live in substandard conditions because of the ministry of Habitat for Humanity. I hope that as I take the time to lock the cabinets each evening, I will be reminded that no task is too small or insignificant in the Kingdom of God. I think that now if my supervisor tried to remove this task from my responsibilities, I would resist because it has now become a sign and symbol of my calling to serve Christ with my whole life and heart.
So, here in the darkness of a sleepless night, I am offering a prayer to God. It's a prayer of confession for my arrogance and unwillingness to be a true servant of Christ. It's also a prayer of thanksgiving for God's Spirit that has moved in my heart to prod me awake to wrestle with these issues in my life. It's also a prayer of praise for a God Who showers grace upon me and offers me the chance to start over again in faith and hope.
I thank you for taking the time to read my late-night ramblings. I thank you for the gift of your presence along my journey!
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