Beautiful Are The Feet

Have you ever seen love? What did it look like? Was it a card, or a bunch of flowers, or maybe a hug you didn’t expect? You can show love to people in a lot of ways, and sometimes it can be pretty spectacular. Jesus of course said that the greatest love you can have for anyone is to lay down your life for them – and then He went out and lived it. Before that though He gave another example of what love looks like. John 13 starts with the disciples and Jesus entering the house where they will eat their last Passover meal together, and verse 1 says Jesus “showed them the full extent of his love.” The next few verses show the most wonderful and poignant example of what a servant leader really looks like – Jesus sets aside His outer garment, wraps a towel around His waist, and washes His disciples’ feet. That night He tells them, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” You can’t get much clearer than that! Jesus lived out in His life the best example of a servant leader anyone has ever seen, and humans are to this day struggling to match His example.

Sometimes, they come pretty close. Here’s our team leader Vanessa. It’s always a challenge to be thrust into a leadership position, and she’s been up to the task every step of the way. She’s usually very involved in whatever we’re doing as a team, so when she spent six hours one day doing nothing but reading her Bible and scribbling furiously in her journal, we knew something was up. That night we found out what. One by one we were called around the corner to a little place out of the way where she was waiting with a bucket of water. God had laid on her spirit that day to truly desire a servant heart, and to show it to us she had prepared some stuff. She had verses and words of encouragement, prayerfully selected, and while we talked she washed our feet. She dried them with her own towel, and anointed our feet with lotion as well. I remember thinking as she did this, “this must be what the disciples felt, seeing their leader down at their feet washing off all the dirt and grime” – and let me tell you our feet were all pretty dirty at that point! If I’ve gotten anything from my time studying the Bible so far this month, it’s this: 

What better way to show love than the way Jesus did on His last night before His death? What better way can there be to live the true life of a servant leader than to strive to emulate Jesus in everything you do? That night, in the most truly unexpected of places, I saw a little piece of God’s love.

I’m a little dense, so when God wants to make a point with me he generally needs to drive it home with a sledgehammer – so of course later that night I was talking with Ignacio (our contact with IncaLink, the organization we’re working with in Ecuador) and somehow the conversation rolled around to what it means to be a leader. He’s been working hard in several communities in the area to raise up churches, and a church without a Godly leader will never grow, so he has some very good insight into what makes a leader. When you look for a leader, he said, don’t choose the people who thrust themselves forward. People who do that are rarely interested in being a leader for Godly reasons – almost always they are interested in power or glory or simply desire the position of authority for its own sake. You also shouldn’t choose those who sit there and don’t involve themselves. Even though they might have leadership ability, if they’re not interested in furthering the church they’re not a good choice for leader. The best choice might not even be at the church meeting – they might be too busy using their truck to haul groceries for the elderly, or mentoring a young person in a rough spot. The best choice for a church leader is the servant. The person you want in charge is the person who cares so much about furthering the work of the Kingdom that they volunteer their spare time to do things nobody else wants to do, that have a passionate desire to do anything they can to the fullest extent of their abilities regardless of what they are. The people who want to be leaders for selfish reasons will run off and find a place they want to be in, and not benefit the body of believers. Those who do not want to be leaders will perhaps accept the mantle of leadership, but it will fit poorly and there will again be no benefit to the body. The servant, who might not recognize any leadership ability within himself at all but will humbly accept the position if asked to, who is so earnestly committed to the church and its community that he will seek to become what God desires of him – that is the person you want to find to put in charge of a church.

This whole thing really hit home to me. For a long time I had desired leadership roles because I wanted to be respected, because I wanted to prove that I could handle the pressures of office and do a great job. I wanted to believe I was leadership material, because the leaders are the important people everyone remembers. Nobody studies the lives of the President’s limo drivers. It’s not easy for me to admit that I’m less than I want to be, that I have in some way failed to live up to my own expectations for myself – but if I can’t let down my pride now, sleeping on a straw mat under a mosquito net thousands of miles from home will be the least of my worries. So I’m done with all that stuff of wanting to be the guy everyone looks to, the guy who always has all the answers, the guy everyone respects. I’ve often thought of what I want on my tombstone, as my epitaph – an honest reflection of the life I’ve lived. For a long time I thought I’d like something like, “Here lies a really cool guy” or “This dude was so important you probably came here just to see his grave” – but now I see that’s not really even close to important. The truth is, the highest compliment I’ve ever seen God give anyone was in I Samuel 13:14, where God describes David as “a man after his own heart” – and that’s what I want people to see in my life. The heart of God is love – over and over again Jesus preaches of the love of His Father, and it was in fact that very love that sent Jesus to Earth to open the way for eternal life for all people! What better way to seek God’s heart than to love, and what better way can there be to love than to serve? It’s funny how the things we learned as children are sometimes the most profound, and a song I sang as a small child in Sunday School has been running through my head a lot lately: