Real Service, Real Joy

 So I wrote most of this a while ago, but I just thought I would post it now, as the school year is coming to a close.

The week before Spring Break, we had a Palauan "camp meeting," which took place at the Ngarachamayong Cultural Center (no camping involved).  Being there with all the members of Palau's churches was pretty neat, but the speaker was the most amazing part.

His name is Andrew Michell, and right now he lives in the Philippines.  But his story certainly didn't start there.  He used to be a burglar who did drugs and alcohol, and who was the getaway car for a group of robbers.  He talked about a Halloween crime spree that involved robbing everyone from drug dealers to a grandmother who was beaten in the face with a gun and taken into the basement as her house was ransacked.  Andrew went to prison at the age of 16 for a variety of charges including kidnapping and theft.  He was supposed to be in jail for 13 years, but while he was in solitary confinement someone gave him a Bible.  He began reading it, and over the next few years his life changed.  He became a Christian, took high school classes from jail, gave money to charity, and was set free early (after 10 years) because of his remarkable turnaround.

From there, he didn't know what to do, but he prayed for opportunities to help people, and they came.  He took mission trips, taught children in Costa Rica, cared for lepers and mentally ill people in China, and spent five years in an orphanage in Thailand.  He later met the grandmother he had robbed, and found out that she had been praying for him all these years.  She broke into tears when he told her all the experiences he was having as he helped people around the world.  She had already forgiven him, and she ended up petitioning for him to receive a full pardon which allowed him to enter countries that had barred him because of his criminal record before.

I have to say that there's no trace of his past that I could see.  Pastor Michell described how happy he was to clean lepers' sores, and how it even gave him joy to change their diapers.  He told a story about clipping a mental ward patient's overgrown toenails and cleaning the filthy ears of people with no hands...and he was smiling.

It made me wonder if I would be that happy to do those things.  Would I find joy in changing diapers and scraping dead skin from a leper's decomposing feet?  Would I show that much love to a mentally ill man who needed a pedicure?  Sitting there in the audience, looking at the graphic pictures, I realized that I didn't have that kind of attitude.

There was a quote attributed to Mother Theresa that said something like (I'm paraphrasing here),

"The wonder of these acts of service isn't that we do them; it's that we enjoy doing them."

I realized that I don't want to just serve and perform good deeds...I want to have that kind of joy that an ex-convict had as he was set free to do the most unglamorous work for people who were rejected by society.  That's real service.  Anyone can perform an act that looks like a good deed, but not everyone can serve others as a way of life...and love doing it. 

Maybe some people think it's so wonderful what we're doing over here, but we're not really that special.  We aren't any more patient or loving or self-sacrificing than anyone else.  We get tired and frustrated and worn out, and sometimes struggle to remember why we're here.  Especially in these last couple of weeks, we're burnt out.  It makes me think of Joseph saying, "It is not in me" (Genesis 41:16).  We don't have it in us to keep going.  But thankfully, "the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works" (John 14:10).

I'm glad that we have a God who can give us happiness in doing things that don't seem so attractive on the surface.  And I'm glad He can even change the hardest hearts (and I'm not just talking about Andrew Michell's).  I hope we can all find that kind of joy.