I was recent­ly lis­ten­ing to the Jen­nifer All­wood Show on iTunes and she said some­thing to the effect of not let­ting fear be an excuse for not lis­ten­ing to Gods call­ing over your life. If you would have asked me this time last year to set up a pho­to booth for a large com­mu­ni­ty event host­ed my our church I would have declined our of pure fear. In fact, no one would have even thought to ask me to dec­o­rate because well, no one knew I could. Even me. I had chalked up my love to cre­ate and dec­o­rate and DIY as mere­ly a hob­by my entire life. Much less ever believed in myself enough to put my work on dis­play for the world to see. I had not ever even con­sid­ered it as a true God-giv­en gift. I thought ser­vice looked like clean­ing the church, greet­ing peo­ple at the door, cook­ing for the sick…you know, all those things us church peo­ple are sup­posed to do. Please, don’t get me wrong, all of those things are amaz­ing acts of ser­vice but I nev­er felt called to do any of those things. I felt like I did­n’t fit it to any giv­en spot for ser­vice, it always felt way more forced that I thought God would be hap­py with, if that makes any sense at all. I mean, wasn’t doing this stuff, being the hands and feet of Jesus, sup­posed to bring you joy? I nev­er real­ly felt that to be com­plete­ly hon­est, not until recently.

Last night I expe­ri­enced a whole dif­fer­ent kind of joy. The pure joy of serv­ing with con­fi­dence that I did have a gift that God can and would use for His glo­ry. It wasn’t forced, I tru­ly felt that I could put my tal­ent to work and help reach peo­ple. I tru­ly enjoyed every moment of the plan­ning, prepa­ra­tion and the actu­al doing of this project. That isn’t to say that ser­vice isn’t going to require work and sac­ri­fice of your time, because it will. God has opened so many doors for oppor­tu­ni­ty in my life and busi­ness late­ly and it felt so good to be able to give back to him. 

You may be think­ing, how in the world is set­ting up a cute area for pic­tures con­sid­ered  an act of ser­vice? Lis­ten, y’all… you wouldn’t believe how many  smil­ing fac­ing I saw right here in front of this back­drop. I saw fam­i­ly and friends from all over our great­ly unchurched com­mu­ni­ty com­ing togeth­er to get that per­fect (or not so per­fect) fam­i­ly shot. Who knows, maybe God was work­ing on soft­en­ing hearts as those fam­i­lies squeezed in the pho­to, maybe He was birthing a rela­tion­ship between a lost soul and a church that want­ed to love on their com­mu­ni­ty. What­ev­er the case may be, it’s not our job to wor­ry about whether or not our gifts have made an impact. God only asks us to plant, He will do the rest.  Sure, there would have been a pho­to booth with­out my help, but I would have missed the bless­ing God had wait­ing for me. I used the gift that HE gave me to cre­ate this love­ly space for fam­i­lies and friends to cap­ture mem­o­ries on our church grounds. I was His hands and feet in that moment and that was all I was called to do. 

Please hear my heart on this, I am not shar­ing this to toot my own horn, but rather to encour­age you to lis­ten to that tug on your heart. God has put some­thing inside you that you may not even real­ize is there. Look inward and search deep to find that call­ing, that gift. Maybe look at the things you enjoy through a dif­fer­ent lens and ask how I can do this to the glo­ry of God. If it scares the heck out of you, do it any­way. I won’t go into all the details in this post but if you know me and know my sto­ry then you know that this time last year, I had zero con­fi­dence in myself and my spir­i­tu­al gift as a cre­ative. I reject­ed that call­ing for years. By ignor­ing that call­ing, I was reject­ing God, telling him His gift to me wasn’t good enough for service. 

Some­times I won­der if we would be bet­ter off not wor­ry­ing so much about the results of our ser­vice, God has that part cov­ered, and instead, focused on what is tak­ing place in our hearts as we serve.  We can focus on the por­tion of the sto­ry that God has asked us to lit­er­al­ly be the hand and feet.