Service Sunday: An Introduction

Service Sunday

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."  - Anne Frank

An Introduction

Amidst all this vanity that Chelsea and I promote here on Everyday Lustre I figured we could use a little something that promotes the selfless side of us, even a column that I hope will encourage you and I both to find ways of serving our community, our friends and our neighbors.  I hope it will be a place where we can discuss how we, together, can make the world a better place in our own small ways and help our children to do the same.  As I grow older and learn more about the goings on of the world around me I experience feelings of both pride and excitement as well as pain and sorrow.  Amazing, intelligent, adventurous people are everywhere, helping, sacrificing, teaching, learning, understanding, helping, and serving in capacities that I could never even dream of.  People are doing BIG things!  And they are making the world a better place.  The desire to get my own hands dirty strengthens almost every day.  I want to help with the BIG problems of the world.  Many overly dramatic days I spend feeling disappointed that I'm not doing anything for war torn Africa or crumbled and starving Haitians.  But as I contemplate this frustration in my life I always return to a few thoughts.  1.) There is a Time and a Season:  My life now is not conducive to traipsing about the world, PhD in tow, to help people in third world countries.  I wouldn't know the first thing about helping in any of those situations.  But the day may come when working in some humanitarian field may be my season of life.  And if that happens, what a joy it will be...how EXCITING!  But I also know, with very little doubt, that when that day comes, I will miss THIS day that I am in now, and that will be compounded by regrets if I do not seize it.  Which brings me to my second thought...2.) "Seize the day" AND "Bloom where you are planted":  Now is my time to be a mother.  It might be yours as well.  Or your season might be being single, a newlywed, a grandmother, a father, a friend of someone in need and the list goes on.  Regardless of what season we are in, it is fleeting.  You will rarely encounter an elderly person that will not testify of this. If we spend all of our season dreaming of another we fail at what we have the blessed opportunity of doing NOW!  Would I really want to give up being here for my children, day or night, for anything else in the whole wide world?  My answer comes so simply, "No".  I don't think there are limits to what we can do as mothers or anything for which our passion runs deep.  If we truly invest our hearts and passions into the season we are in we can find a well of service needed right here where we are.  This Well is where I hope to go dipping every Sunday.  The well that reminds us of the wonderful places where we are needed right now, right here, right where we are today.  I look forward to finding that place every week.  I look forward to your suggestions, ideas, thoughts and comments as well.  And for the record, I don't think shopping for furniture, clothes, great gifts or whatever we end up posting about here is purely vanity!  Everyone can benefit from a little creative outlet! And everyone can benefit from a little service!  I hope you enjoy!

xoxo 

Ashley