In I Peter 4:9-10 it says :
Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in it's various forms.
I believe service to others gets a bad rap. Serving others is a gift less to the person who is being served and more to the one who is doing the serving.
My experience has always been that when serving others, I am the one who gets the joy and encouragement. I am not a great painter, but when the hurricane hit Galveston I was there to help and while painting the outside of this house, the owner came and painted with me. The stories they told about the storm, about the house and it's decades of history was fascinating.
When a tornado took a church in Crosby, my daughters and I were just suddenly singled and I thought an act of service would be something to give the a sense of power in themselves....we ripped up carpet and cleaned up the pad of the church that had been blown away.
My point isn't to brag, my point is that we didn't have specific carpenter talents, we didn't know what we were doing when we were bleaching out the flooded homes but we knew how to paint on the walls and we knew how to love on hurting families. we knew how to spend some time with the children - playing and talking about how they were feeling.
In I Peter 4:9-10 it says to use the talents you have to serve others....and I assure you if you do that this Fall, you will know that Service is more for you than for them. It's a God thing.
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