This week...
Posted by Amanda , Saturday, February 20, 2010 2:30 PM
Speaker: Rick Allegretto
Topic: Servant Leadership
We teamed up with the DTS (Discipleship Training School) this week and held classes together for lecture on servant leadership. I feel like this is an area that I am constantly learning about and trying to apply to my own life, so it was nice to be able to focus on it for the week. We started out by talking about our attitudes and how we face situations. Our attitude has the capacity to alter the outcome of every situation and can also affect and change the attitudes of others. This is especially true when you live in community like I do. We are around the same people every day, all day long and it is very easy for attitudes to affect each other. Another thing we discussed was the people that influence us and the qualities and characteristics we see in their lives that make us look up to them. Generally we saw the same characteristics in all of the people we admired and most of their characteristics could be drawn from the fruits of the spirit (love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control). These are all actions—things we can put into practice.
In the middle of the week, we had a night of worship and God totally wrecked my heart. I was sitting there, thinking about different situations in my life. I was thinking about what my life would look like in the future: marriage, kids, traveling. I was thinking about how I wanted to love others more, how I wanted my love to change people. I want to just be a simple instrument in the hands of God, loving people and bringing them hope. And then I felt like God said, “Would you give your future up, your hopes, marriage, kids, traveling, in order to see people’s lives changed through your love?” I basically crumbled to the ground. I think I spent an hour there…just thinking, crying, praying. I want to serve others through love and I want people to know the enormous love of God, but was I willing to give some stuff up in order to see that happen? I don’t know, honestly. It was hard. I argued with God for quite a while. I always pray things like that, such powerful stuff like, “God, I want to give you my everything. Use me to show Your love.” But man…do I know what I’m praying? That’s so intense. Anyways, I feel like something changed that night. I don’t know if I actually gave those things up to God. I do still desire those things so much, but I know God is good and I’m content in Him. I think it’s a process, I mean life is a process…but slowly, surely God is giving me a bigger heart, more capacity to love and more wisdom. It’s pretty cool, I think. So I’m really hoping He will teach me how to be a servant leader as I walk into my future. I want to get to the place where others are really more important than myself and where I’m not selfishly putting my needs before everyone else. Again…it’s a process. But it’s good.
For outreach this week, a group of us went to Casa Viva (the Foster Care organization). They were holding a meeting with all of the Foster parents, so during the meeting we took care of the kids and held a program for the older children. Becky and I were in charge of the babies and we ended up having five of them. I’m not gonna lie, it was a rough night. Becky and I both had headaches and it seemed that we always had at least two crying babies. Some of the staff was there helping us out, so that was good. There was one little girl who was all smiles the whole time. She was constantly blowing me kisses and seemed to enjoy anything that was happening around her. Her smile definitely blessed me in the midst of all the crying and headaches. Everything went great with the older kids. They played some games, colored pictures and had story time. Overall, it was cool to be able to take care of the kids, but still a bit hard.
Here's a picture that one of our classmates, Daniel drew for Becky and I:
