The Joy of Servanthood

Submitted by Daniel…

I am blessed by my mom’s servant-like attitude, and it gives me a window into the sheer joy of servanthood. For a few years now, she has been wanting to serve the handicapped or autistic children, spending her free time taking classes and learning the American Sign Language so that she can one day use these skills. But being as old as she is, she got virtually no interviews, even when she wanted to just volunteer for free. But she just wanted to somehow serve, so she just kept at it, and one elementary school in Alameda decided to let her be a volunteer in a class of autistic children.

She was very excited, but to her dismay they didn’t call her to come in at all. After some waiting, she started to just go to the school and showed up to the class, wondering how she could help. Without any invitation or request for help, she would show up 2 times a week and started to observe the situation in the classroom, trying to understand how she could help. Then she realized that there didn’t seem to be any room for her. The classroom was busily run by a group of 5 teachers who had been working together for a very long time, and they had great teamwork and knew exactly what to do. She said that she felt like her presence was just a nuisance in that classroom.

But instead of such a realization causing her to become cynical, she just did whatever she was told to help with. They asked her to put velcro on fabric, to glue things together, etc. And then one day, they asked her if she could make a poster regarding street lights. They just wanted her to cut out 3 big colored circles and paste it onto a black background, but my mom asked them if she could take the work home and draw something more interesting. They said for her to go ahead, and she brought the posterboard home and drew a fun picture of a fat police officer stopping surprised school kids from jaywalking. (Unbeknownst to them, my mom was, for a period of 10 years, a professional artist). When she brought back the poster, the teachers were faint with delight, and they started to ask her to redo and redraw all sorts of posters and pictures in the room. The rumor has spread that there’s an artistic volunteer, and she has become the most popular volunteer in the school. She was delighted to tell me that she currently has many backed-up work orders for different posters she’s being asked to draw.

What I see in her these days is sheer joy. She didn’t plan on going to that school so that she can draw. She just wanted to help somehow, and she had no idea that her artistic talents would be used in this kind of way. She told me that after she became a Christian (which was during my college days), she wondered how her art was glorifying God, and she ended up giving up her professional art career, because she thought that her art was “just creating more unnecessary junk in the world”. But when she went into this school and just decided to be a servant and help out by doing whatever she could, she suddenly found that God was taking her desires to help and mending them with her past talent that she thought were long gone. She tearfully told me, “I never would have guessed that I would be actually helping really needy people in this kind of way. All I did was just show up to help and do whatever I could do. And now, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”

As I listened to her story, I was just amazed at how God took her persistent willingness to serve others and turned it into a life-redefining and redemptive work that gave her life and her past a sense of coherence. She is taking English conversation classes now on the days where she is not volunteering, so that she could better communicate with the students. It is as if my mom, at the age where most people look back at their past with longing, has found her calling in life and looks forward to each day. One thing is for sure: she is joyful… She feels the joy and freedom of servanthood. And the pile of posters building up on our dining room table is a testimony of how God took her willingness to serve and turned it into an unexpected source of abundant blessing and joy.