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Ideally, service is a proficiency you learned from toddlerhood onwards. Just as reading is a skill that some learn as toddlers and others at age 8, but there comes a time when, if a child cannot read, a panic button is and should be pushed. If a child reaches the end of the teen years and still is not service- minded, I would push the panic button and set aside all else to target this.

Beginning Curriculum

Hebrews 10:24 commands us to “consider how to stir up one another to love and good works.” That is the intent of this program. Instead of college and instead of career, you will be spending 40 hours a week in service. Understandably, this will not be intuitive to you. So initially, your acts of benevolence will be assigned to you. Then, when you can joyfully, enthusiastically, and thoroughly complete each task assigned, you will be ready for stage two.

Phase Two

This intermediate phase works to help you become more astute in seeing needs in others. After every social encounter you will be asked to summarize needs you heard or saw expressed. This will range from the spoken yearnings of the widow to have help in her garden to the harried homeschooler who lacks adequate time to tutor her child in math. You will be taught to analyze the spoken and unspoken messages and then to formulate the scheduling of your acts of service. When you have mastered this, you will be ready for the final exam.

Final Exam

Unlike most finals, this particular exam will take a number of weeks to complete. What will be examined will be your ability to see a need and respond spontaneously. Here is what it will look like. You will see a family struggling to unload young children and their paraphernalia at church and you will jump in to offer to carry a diaper bag and toddler. At a community meal, you will be the one setting and clearing the table while others visit. At the store you will be the one scrambling to pick up the spilled pennies of the elderly or pushing the cart for the disabled. When you see your neighbor mowing his lawn, it will be you sweeping the excess grass off his walk.

Service for you may never seem natural. Even ardent worshippers of God struggle in this area. Remember when you learned to ride a bike? Balancing on that wobbly 2-wheeled knee-scraping machine was hardly natural. For some children, the process took an afternoon, for others, weeks. But eventually, most learned and what was once unnatural and awkward is now intuitive. It is our hope that service will become that for each and every one of you. And knowing that true service is not intuitive for any one of us may we fix our hope on Christ who works through us with His energy, who works for (serves) those who wait for Him, and who is our Savior, correcting and forgiving us when we fail.