"That's why it's always such a hack off
to me when people talk about my ministry. I tend to think my ministry
is to clean up my hotel room before I leave. My ministry is to leave
a generous tip for a waitress who's having a really lousy day and
who's had a bad attitude when waiting on me. My ministry is to not
tailgate people who are driving like idiots in front of me. If you're
a Christian, ministry is just an accident of being alive...of being
Christian. It just happens. And I don't know that you can divide your
life up and say, “This is my ministry” and “This is my other
thing”, because the fruits of Christianity affect everybody around
us.”
Rich Mullins
Hello. It's been several months. I wish
I could say I felt bad about that, but...
I was driving home after a weekend with
my sons a few days ago. We do this sort of thing once a year, a
little “guys thing” that has turned into a tradition over the
years (Do it once, it's an accident. Do it twice, it's a tradition).
Lots of music, fun, jokes, some arguing (it bothers their dad, but I
guess it's to be expected among brothers) and lots of discussion,
some light-hearted and some pretty serious. I was having one of those
serious discussions with #1 son, who has gotten married since last we
spoke, about work and how it sucks and what it means. There was some
stuff in there about Kant too, but try as I might to figure out
what he meant I just...kant.
Sorry. That's been there since the weekend, and I had to get it out of my
system.
#1 son is newly married, as I said, and
has moved to a new town, looking for work, getting ready to finish
school, etc. He got a job without too much effort, but in retail,
which he doesn't really like. A “Been there, done that” sort of
thing. He talked of how hard it was to find meaning in a retail job,
how absurd he felt catering to people working hard at jobs they don't
like so they can buy things they don't really need, things that are
going to satisfy them only momentarily until the NEXT BIG THING comes
along, so they'll work harder to afford more things...it's a fairly
standard complaint, but no less powerful for that. He had decided
that the only way to make any meaning out of the short amount of time
he spends with the customers who talk to him was to bring some sort
of joy into their lives in that short amount of time. I remember he
mentioned how easily the attitudes of other people affect him, that
he can be in a bad mood and someone will do him some small kindness
and it will lift his spirits and lighten his burden, at least for a
while. And so recognizing that, he determined that he should use his
time at work to do the same to the customers he sees, to help them
find this thing or that and do so cheerfully and courteously, not so
they can find and purchase something material and temporal but so
that they can, at least for a moment, feel some small amount of joy,
that someone cares enough to treat them with courtesy and respect. We
agreed, I think, that in much of life we can be nothing more than
mobile dispensers of small servings of grace to the people that we
see. And that even though it may be all we can do, that's no excuse to not do all that we can do.
My first couple of shifts back from
that weekend with the boys have not gone well. It would not be an
exaggeration to say they have really sucked. Very busy, long hours on
the road, difficult people, stressful situations, bad food, no rest.
Monday was definitely that way, and this shift has been only a little
better. The morning started badly, with truck problems followed by a
couple of meetings (does anybody like those things?) but my boss
decided we should eat at Chick Fil A for lunch. #3 son's girlfriend
works at CFA, and when we walked in I looked behind the counter
hoping to see her. She was there, working the drive through with the
little headphones on, and I watched her rush around for a minute or 2
before she saw me and waved...
...and gave me a smile that lit up the
restaurant just as it did the black, gloomy corners of my mood.
Friendly, warm, at the same time open and a little shy it seemed, and
absolutely brilliant. My morning brightened along with everything
else. And I'll bet she didn't even realize what it meant to me.
Now, I wish I could tell you that I
floated through the rest of the day on the luminescence of that
smile, but I suspect you'd know better. It was lovely, and it warmed me
to my toes, but it was just a smile. A couple of hours later I found
myself tearing down the highway in a truck with no air conditioning
to urgent business in the middle of nowhere. It was hot, sticky, and
unpleasant, and my mood matched the circumstances. So you might say the smile didn't do that much good. I might say that, but I
might be wrong too. Because, if we live our days as a series of ups
and downs along a baseline of “normal”, where might I have been
in the afternoon if not for the lift that smile gave me? The
afternoon call in a malfunctioning truck was well into the negative
part of the graph, but how much further into the negative might I
have been if not for that smile, that small serving of grace that
boosted me, for a little while at least, well into the positive.
My wife has this thing. We all refer to
it, only half-jokingly, as her gift. She has this striking ability to
cause people to open up to her for NO APPARENT REASON. Complete
strangers, with little or no prompting, will just start talking to
her, and tell her about themselves and what's going on in their
lives, sometimes good, sometimes bad. It's amazing to me, and
sometimes uncomfortable as well, some of the things that they will
just say to her. It'll start off conventionally enough, talk of the
weather or this grocery item or that book, and 2 minutes later
they'll be telling her about parents that they don't speak to, or about being left by a girlfriend to raise her kid, or not being able to
stop drinking, or...whatever. The very notion just horrifies me, but she smiles and
listens and sometimes offers advice, always encouragement, and if led
to do so, a little prayer too. We'll be walking through the store,
I'll look around and see her talking to someone a couple of aisles
over, and I'll ask the kids “Who's Mom talking to?” “She's
doing that thing she does”, and so we go shopping for 20 or 30
minutes until she catches up with us. She doesn't push, just listens
until they're talked out, and I've noticed that almost without exception
the stranger walks away with a little brighter look and a little
lighter step. A small serving of grace can do that.
I had been feeling like I should write
about this since the weekend, but hadn't done so. We watched a movie
about Rich Mullins a couple of days ago, and it was that movie that
led me to the quote above, and that, with the smile from #3
girlfriend, finally pushed me into dragging out the laptop. So if
there's blame to be had for this, there it is.
It's not at all a novel thought.
Mullins is right though, our ministry isn't this thing we do that is
separate from the other thing we do. Our every waking moment is, or
at least ought to be, our ministry. Leaving a rude waitress a decent tip, ministry. Helping an impatient and demanding
customer with courtesy and respect, ministry. Listening to the
problems of a stranger, ministry. Smiling at a friend in the middle
of a busy and difficult day, ministry. Treating a difficult coworker
with understanding instead of impatience, ministry. In those ways and
countless thousands of others we can be mobile dispensers of small
servings of grace, small cups of water to slake the thirst of a
parched someone next to us. It's so easy to overlook that. I absolutely
suck at it. It's not that I never do it, but I know I don't do it as often as I should. I don't share the cup as often as it has been shared with me. But it strikes me as perhaps the height of ingratitude to consistently fail to pass the cup around, to share with others the small servings of grace given to us. We don't have to be stingy with it. It's a cup that, like the oil jar in the
Hanukkah miracle, never runs dry. There's enough to go around,
because the Well from which it springs is a Well that will never run
dry.
May we be eternally grateful for that. And may we express that gratitude by sharing the cup.
Rich Mullins quote from Cornerstone 97,
round table discussion re Contemporary Christian Music.
