Servants or Friends?
I am constantly asking myself the question…Am I a servant, or a friend? Earlier this evening a resident from Joshua Station, the residential transitional housing facility for homeless families, called my wife in an excited state and said, “I’m moving close to you!” As my wife talked to her and shared in the excitement of a new friend moving into our neighborhood, I thought about the environment we work in where the question of servanthood and friendship lie in delicate balance for us.
On the one hand, we serve a population of impoverished adults in transition from homelessness to housing while on the other hand the line between professional and clientele are often blurred due to our love for their families, but more due to our shared need for love and support in this life.
In a book called “And You Call Yourself a Christian: Toward Responsible Charity” Dr. Robert Lupton in chapter eleven of his book clearly titles this chapter, “Servants or Friends?” His poise for the chapter is a query on the call of Christ to His disciples within His final hours as His call changes the term to them from servants to friends, and the implications and changes towards the attitude of life towards “the other” whom we serve today for us Christians where we are their called to be their friends not servants.
Dr. Lupton points out that for Christ in His last hour, it was more important that we know “What the master is doing” as friends…where the relationship is forever marked by friendship rather than temporarily impacted by servanthood.
I am uncertain the final implications of such a gesture for us as humans to the ever living diving human in Christ, but for those of us who remain in Him, the implications of this are dire to those whom we serve, or better yet, befriend. As mentioned earlier, one of the residents of Joshua Station is moving in our neighborhood, and we will befriend her.
Yesterday my wife allowed the unwanted daughter of a certain family to watch our children as she befriended our family. Everyday fatherless children from our neighborhood befriend our kids, and we take them to t-ball games while their parents remain absent. This is not a testimony to our goodness, but our feeble attempts to incorporate what Christ said in his last hours, “No longer do I call you servants for the servant does not know what the master is doing. I call you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you.”
My call to all of us…Where do we invite those whom we serve into friendship, or do we keep them at bay as simply those whom we serve? I am not free from this and I am more inclined to keep them all at bay. This stems from an internal desire to feel different than “they”…but truth is, “we” are all the same. Aside from the similar fact that Christ shed His blood for us all, as human beings we linger in the frailty of our common existence. And that is enough to force me to desire as many friends as I can get.
Comments
Well put, Sam. I fully agree the shared need for love and support. I also got that same expression from a recent trip to Guatemala...the few hours that we spend in the maxium secuity prison that locked up the MS13 gangs. Haven't talk to you since we depart in Phoenix. How're you doing these days?
Posted by: Anthony C. Ng | June 3, 2006 01:01 PM