Ministry this month has been a little different than most of you may be thinking. Normally, when you hear about people on missions trips, you hear about these incredible stories of them building entire schools, healing the blind, and working with orphans. And although that is wonderful and so cool to hear about, that is not always what ministry looks like.
This month, my team and I are participating in an ATL month. ATL stands for Ask The Lord, this means that we are finding our own housing, food, and ministry all while asking God for direction in all of it. As we began looking for different ministry opportunities, we looked for the obvious organizations. Orphanages, schools, churches, and nursing homes. However, every time we went to see if these places needed help, they all told us no.
We were so confused, are we even missionaries if we aren’t working in one of these places? Why was God making this so difficult for us? Were we praying the wrong prayers? Well, the answer to all of these anxious questions can be found in
Psalms 46:10 “Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among nations, I will be exalted throughout the world.”
You see, we had been ignoring the fact that God wanted us to start small. He was telling us to minister to the people around us. The people on the street corner, the people staying at our hostel, the people who stop us to take pictures. One of the main phrases used here on the Race is “Ministry is Life and Life is Ministry”. This means that your life should revolve around sharing God’s love. We shouldn’t only share God’s word when we are preaching in front of a church or serving food to the homeless. We need to be sharing God’s word and love every second of every day. This may look like opening the door for someone, buying someone’s lunch, taking the time to talk to someone you don’t even know, just to brighten their day.
We as Christians often put ourselves higher than most because of our “relationship with God”. But that is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what God called us to do. He tells us to reach out to the crying woman in the bathroom, He tells us to make eye contact with the beggar on the street and smile, He asks us to be nice to the person everyone despises. Our job as Christians is to make ourselves lower than even the lowest person so that we can raise them up. We are the ones who reach out to the unseen.
To be a missionary does not mean you are performing miracles every day of your life and planting churches everywhere you go. It means you are lifting people up in any way possible and always putting them before yourself because life is ministry and ministry is life.
So I ask you, what are you doing to reach out to the people around you? Are you lowering yourself to lift others up? Or are you focusing only on yourself because some missionary out there is doing the big work for you?
I challenge you to make someone’s day today by lowering yourself to lift them up. Whether that’s letting them go ahead of you in the grocery line, or opening a door and smiling. It all goes towards glorifying God, even the little things.
