If you ever get the chance, there’s a Jon Gibson song I really recommend you listen to called On Calvary. You might get it on iTunes, or Amazon, but obviously for both himself and meself it would be better if you just got it direct from his own web-site in the Buy Music section under the album Soulful Hymns. He doesn’t know I’m promoting his stuff, I don’t get any money or kudos from the exercise, I love the song, I love a lot of his stuff.
Anyway, this is not the time for a Jon Gibson love-fest. It’s about the song and the nature of it and how that relates to the minutiae of my daily life in the wider panorama of the eternal purposes of God. So here we go, the song’s nature talks about what the sacrifice of Jesus Christ means to the individual (lets say me) and how a wave of love is now opened up in us because of the wave of love He poured out for us on Calvary.
Yesterday I was hinting at this compassion and love in reference to the confessing and covering community. Today I got to see a bit more of that from the perspective of someone I served and reflected back on me. For the benefit of the exercise, I’m a tutor for a training company in Northampton helping people who have been unemployed for six months or more to build skills and the like to support them into employment. The clientele are between 18 and 25 and so some have hardly ever worked, some have known nothing but work, some have no qualifications and some have fairly decent qualifications. Some don’t need my help, some don’t want me help, some wouldn’t know where they need help even though it’s glaringly obvious and some need my help and are willing to accept it.
It is my honour and privilege to serve these young people not just in the surface areas of how to fill in application forms or to construct and target CV’s, but also in special cases to go deeper and address some issues that prevent them from acknowledging who they are and what they are capable of doing. Quite a few of the customers come from shattered backgrounds and some in any case are on a low from the depression and demotivation of having been unemployed for so long. Today for example there were two very different instances that highlighted why I love the job I do.
One customer (and I hate referring to them as such, but that is the term used for them), as I was saying, one person had a nightmare of an existence since losing a job, losing his home and losing his girlfriend at a similar time. By the time he came on the course he was thoroughly a shell of any former self he may have been and devoid of motivation and ideas. As we talked through things briefly and I shared my empathy with his situation from three extended stints of unemployment and he realised that there were people on his side, the look of acceptance and hope in his eyes even in the awareness that there was still a journey ahead was highly gratifying.
Another customer/person had a tremendously brutal upbringing culminating in their getting kicked out of home in their mid teens and having to fend for themselves with no qualifications and indeed seen as hopeless in herself. With the huge emotional and social baggage she carried with her it was difficult getting and sustaining work, but she eeked out some work and built herself slowly and surely through different opportunities to the point that although she’d been out of work for a stint, now based on someone recognising her ability to relate, communicate and effectively influence others she’s encouraged now to explore the teaching route. (Not the conventional school stuff, more like my end of the deal). Being able to facilitate that possibility for her, was just as gratifying as helping the first guy.
What these both have in common and why I love doing what I do is because I’m not so much bothered about the bigger deal of fishes to fry like ‘getting a job’ or ‘being successful’ as the world sees it. I take joy in contributing to someone being exposed ever closer to the light of the love to be found in Jesus Christ. A light that sees the good in people and is desperate to make the connections between their plight and the Cross through building relationships and treating them with dignity, honour, value and love. To see a life slightly improved as a result of being a conduit for His love is a joy in itself – just as much as being faithful to persisting in a role that can get difficult at times when others appear to not want to take their lives seriously at all. Maybe one day, their life will completely be transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit. I pray and hope so.
In the meantime I continue to have the joy of serving in good and bad times and knowing that every investment of time, conversation and what I have to offer is as much my act of worship to God as it is my act of service to my fellow-man and even if the man doesn’t value, recognise or acknowledge it, I know there is One who does. As He does, He reminds me of Calvary where people were mocking Him as others deserted Him, but eventually the love broke through to the hardest heart and the power of the good news of Jesus Christ as declared and expressed in the lives of His followers changed lives.
That’s the only ambition worth pursuing to me.
Just blogging.
That is all.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
dmcd
Life With CD 