Kim Mills has rapidly become one of my favorite bloggers. She is a breath of fresh air in a world of often stale blogs about faith and family, and I highly recommend that you follow her blog. The address can be found at the bottom of the page. You can also follow her on Twitter at @reccewife. I am honored to have her be part of this series.
This may come to a shock to you, but my husband and I haven’t always felt like we fit in at Church. Don’t get me wrong, our Church, it’s one of the most welcoming and loving places I have ever walked into. We have great friends and feel at home there.
But my husband is an Armoured Reconnaissance soldier with the Canadian Forces. And he follows Jesus with his whole heart. Those two worlds are hard to reconcile. There are very few soldiers in our church. Or in any church we know. Whether it’s the long absences from home that make it next to impossible for him to be active in any official Church ministries, or that booming Drill Sgt. Voice that announces when the Service is starting to our chatty Sunday morning congregation still lingering in the Foyer... he’s never cared much that he tends to stand out.
As a slightly more self-conscious person, with a love for Jesus, a fondness for tattoos, an ability to speak louder and faster to longer I talk, and a slight *ahem* potty mouth... I can be a little conspicuous in most Christian circles.
That big word, Ministry, has always seemed hard, for both of us. Neither of us grew up in Church, Ministry seemed like one of those ‘Christianese’ words. Something a little foreign that we needed to learn and do to in order to do things right.
When we were younger, in the beginning of our marriage, both of us served in the Church Youth Group. We stayed up at all nighters, dragged our babies to ear-piercing rock concerts and spent exhausting weekends leading Youth Camps. And we loved it.
But as we had more children and responsibilities, and because I was regularly facing those things without him as his job took his around the world, things got harder. Slowly, we started to realize we were just going through the motions. We didn’t feel called to be there anymore.
This left us with this uncomfortable feeling. That while we served in other ways, my husband found himself on Church Leadership and I started helping in various areas that I thought I might be useful at, we didn’t really have a ‘ministry’. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were supposed to have one. I was sure we weren’t doing a very good job serving God, with him being gone all the time and me without an idea where I fit in among the ministries at our Church.
I seemed to always be busy with something else. I started volunteering at the Family Support at my husband’s unit. I was given the opportunity to coordinate a community closet to help clothe those in need in my small town. All things I loved and felt called to do, done with inexplicable guilt that it might be taking away from time I could be serving God in an actual Church Ministry.
And my husband, he went back to his 3rd tour to Afghanistan and spent time praying for the soldiers he served with. That led to opportunities to pray WITH them. And when the time came, the heartbreaking chance to lead memorials for those who didn’t make it home. Eventually, he even had the chance to lead one of the men to Christ. All in the middle of a desert with no Church or Chaplain in sight. All while feeling the same guilt that he wasn’t at home where he could, you know, serve God at Church.
I mean, ‘Ministry’ happens at church, right? It happens at specially planned activities, events or studies where we talk about only Jesus and know without a doubt we are serving Him. Everything else we do, that’s not ‘Ministry’. That’s just life.
I had become very good at compartmentalizing God in a way that made it so I could only serve Him properly when I was serving in an “official” Church Ministry. Then one day while chatting with a young pregnant woman whose fiancé was deployed to Afghanistan, she invited me, a virtual stranger, to attend her pre-natal classes with her because she didn’t know anyone else and didn’t want to go alone. The problem was those prenatal classes, they happened on the same night I hosted a Bible Study in my home. And it occurred to me – there was no way I was going to tell this girl that I couldn’t be with her when she needed me because I was too busy studying the Bible.
And that revelation, well it opened my eyes to what I had been missing this whole time I was trying to keep God at church and Ministry in a box. Ministry happens everywhere.
Sometimes, it happens through our Churches in amazing ways. It happens at Sunday morning Service. It happens at Youth Group. It happens at Bible Study. We need to serve God that way, to make the local Church the hope of our communities and function as part of our local body of believers. But God is not confined to those things done through things with the label of ‘Ministry’ and serving him can happen anywhere He calls you.
Ministry happens at 2 in the morning emergency room visits with nervous 1st mom’s Braxton Hicks.
Ministry happens at a memorial for a fallen friend in the middle of a war.
It happens whenever you are following God’s leading in your life. Wherever you are.
And right there with that moment of understanding, is where I had my best moment in Ministry.
When I realized that I was already doing it.
~Kim Mills
