Random Seriousness

February 20th, 2006
Entries

A lot has been on my mind recently…weighing me down. I don’t know how to describe it.

I’m no stranger to serving in a church. I hauled the bin of Bibles to the children’s Sunday School when I was a kid, helped out with the ushers in sixth grade, lead worship on Friday nights starting in 7th grade, and started leading worship on Sundays in 10th grade.

And when the final decision was made for college at USC, I knew I wanted to continue serving. I figured that I’d be part of the worship team, since that was what I had been doing for the past 5+ years. I remember talking to Jess about this and she was like, “Yeah, but if you join the worship team, you’ll be locked into it.” She pretty much meant that it would be harder to branch out into other areas and to meet other people. When she first said that, I didn’t believe her and didn’t want to believe her. After all, worship leading had become almost like second-nature to me.

Then college came around and I didn’t join the worship team because there’s an informal policy of new freshman not serving until at least second semester. It was a frustrating time for me, because I was so willing to serve. I felt like I NEEDED to serve in order to feel some sort of belonging in the group, because I felt so left out most of the time.

And yet, I’m glad that happened. I used to feel that “serving” had to be in forms of either worship leading, ushering, or other things I’ve done before. But I felt a personal call to get to know people, especially those that felt left out. For the first time in my life, I knew how that felt in a church; I knew how newcomers felt. And so I made the effort (not EXTRA effort, because we all should be doing it… but I guess I was more AWARE of doing it myself) to reach out to people. Jess was right. Being part of the worship team would have made me feel comfortable, making me feel belong to a particular group. I’d be content with knowing just them and no one else.

But all this reaching out and stuff sometimes makes me feel even MORE left out. Everybody knows that there’s a problem with how we make newcomers feel welcome and accepted. We talk about it a lot. But sometimes I feel like there’s only a few willing to make that effort. Or that they’ll only do it with newcomers who they know they’ll be able to connect with. It just makes me feel like I can’t always talk to the people I want to talk to on Friday nights or on Sundays because I’m trying to get to know someone unfamiliar better.

In terms of serving in general, I look back and I don’t put myself out there that much. I’m willing and open to serving. But in the past, it’s always people asking me to serve in whatever capacity was needed. If I wasn’t asked, it’s because that need had already been taken care of. Like worship at church right now, it’d be awesome to serve on a team again. But I see that they have plenty of people serving already and that there is no current need.

I don’t really know why I wrote this. It’s just been weighing on my mind. It’s frustrating for me to see people seeing serving as just things that need to get done instead of it’s real purpose–to serve each other and God. It’s not just a fun activity that we want to get involved with; there’s a purpose. And I need more strength at times when I feel tired in reaching out to people.

Recently, I’ve come to feel like I don’t really have people I can share my thoughts with. Like if they see a side of me that’s not all happy, quirky, smiling and laughing all the time, they’ll think that something’s wrong. On one hand, I feel like I need people that I can be honest to and they can be honest with me completely. Yet, there’s still so much unfinished work…

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