By Jessica Kast |
Faith has never come easy for me. There have been countless times in my life where I have felt incredibly far away from God and questioned my faith. Throughout these droughts, service has been the only thing that helps to anchor and remind me why it is that I believe in God.
There are many things about faith that are hard to grasp, but the one thing that has always resonated with me is the call to serve others. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus does not simply preach about service. He lives it. He spends time amongst the most rejected of society: the lepers, prostitutes, demon-possessed and beggars. Jesus loved these people as His brothers and sisters. The King of Heaven and Earth, the Messiah, the Son of God, spent all of His time among the people that no one else would even bother to look in the eyes. How humbling is that?!
The message of service in the Bible doesn’t stop there. Matthew 25:31-46 tells us that when we serve others we aren’t just living as Christ lived, we are serving Christ Himself. He is the least fortunate, the rejected, the poor and lowly, the person that no one will bother to look in the eyes. So Jesus tells us that not only does He hang out with the marginalized of society, but He is the marginalized in society. When we see a beggar on the street, Jesus lives in him. Whenever I learn about this in class, hear about it in church or read about it in a book, the message about service in the Bible strikes me, but it’s not what moves me to devote my life to serving others.
There was a time when I was volunteering at an overnight homeless shelter and was challenged to a game of Scrabble by a man that had been homeless off-and-on for 20 years. He beat me at Scrabble five times in a row. Frustrated at the end of the final game, I started to clean up and signal to him that my ego couldn’t take losing one more game. All of a sudden he started laughing. As I caught his eye, I couldn’t help but laugh as well. We were both doubled over laughing hysterically, neither one of us really sure why.
To this day, that experience brings tears to my eyes. That was the exact moment that faith completely made sense to me, that I understood the message of service. I wasn’t called to fix people or solve the world’s problems. Instead, I was called to be part of a human family, where my brothers and sisters came from all walks of life, but with one thing in common. We are all on this journey of faith together. So when I got schooled at Scrabble, I realized that God really lived in that man and God really lived in me. Service became about giving people what I could, be that time, money, or clothes, and most importantly seeing Christ in every person.
Service has become central to my life because it has shown me that faith is not something that is taught or professed; it is something that is lived. St. Francis of Assisi said, “Preach the Gospel at all times and if necessary use words.” This reminds me that it is not enough to know the Gospel or to talk about the Gospel; I need to live it out. My faith calls me to walk with people in the good times and to help people in the bad times because that is what Christ does for us. An act of service doesn’t have to be a grand gesture; rather it is seeing the face of Christ in every person we meet, especially if they are the marginalized in society.
Faith comes easier to me when I serve others, because it is there that I am in the presence of Christ, both giving and receiving a faith that only comes from stripping away everything else except the realization that we are all joined together on a journey of faith and that Christ is alive in every person.
Jessica Kast is a senior social work and theology major. She can be reached at kast14@up.edu.
