Greetings!
“…whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.” – Jesus. (Mark 10:43-44)
Growing up on the farm with six brothers, I can hear my mother singing in the kitchen as I took my turn washing dishes. It's a familiar song, composed by Michael Ryan, “If you want to be great in God’s Kingdom, learn to be the servant of them all.”
Perhaps my mother wanted to make sure I absorbed these words as I dreamed of being a great Philadelphia Phillies pitcher or winning the Nobel Peace Prize. She said to get to being a fastball pitcher or ending world hunger meant you had to learn how to shell lima beans, scrub the kitchen floor and polish shoes for Sunday.
Sixty-three years later, I never made the Phillies nor ended world hunger. But as Executive Director of MDS I sure see a LOT of great Kingdom servants. Who are they? Just in my last two weeks of travel I saw them. They are volunteers from Barto, Pennsylvania prepping an old American Legion building in Crisfield, Maryland for arriving weekly volunteers to build new homes after an unnamed flood last October. Work involves unclogging toilets and repairing leaky faucets.
It involves meeting with local town officials to get the building permits in place, painting the office space and cleaning the oven and refrigerators. It involves meeting the first three homeowners and giving them the good news: we are coming to build you a new home.
They are volunteers from Ohio who worked in the cold rain installing decking on the 310-foot private access bridge in Clendenin, West Virginia. Now 14 families can safely cross the Elk River. That is service. That is greatness! Come join MDS – it is one way to give up the dream of power and fame in service to others.
