Reminders of our purpose

A friend of mine called me from an airport in I think, Detroit today while she was on her way to PA, asking me to help her find something on the internet so she could work on her annual report for this year while she waited for her plane. As I wa looking it up on the internet, I quickly learned that the piece of writing she was looking for, referred to as the Paradoxical Commandments by Kent M. Keith, was something I had come across for the first time during one of my summers at camp. One of my fellow staffers had read it as part of a devotion one day. It reads as follows:

The Paradoxical Commandments by Dr. Kent M. Keith

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.

They are thought provoking statements - and particularly thought provoking for me - I used them as a devotion that I gave while sitting in the lounge of the church I work at today - interviewing for my position. The words still stick in my head - I can even see the little blue piece of paper they were typed on when I saw them the first time. Along with the commandments, I also used another piece for my devotion - an entry from My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers entitled 'Missionary Munitions.' It reads:

"Ministering as opportunity surrounds us. This does not mean selecting our surroundings, it means being very selectly God's in any haphazard surroundings which He engineers for us. The characteristics we manifest in our immediate surroundings are indications of what we will be like in other surroundings.

The things that Jesus did were of the most menial and commonplace order, and this is an indication that it takes all God's power in me to do the most commonplace things in His way. Can I use a towel as He did? Towels and dishes and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal more quickly than anything what we are made of. It takes God Almighty Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty as it ought to be done.

'I have given you an example that ye should do as I have done to you.' Watch the kind of people God brings around you , and you will be humiliated to find that this is His way of revealing to you the kind of person you have been to Him . Now, He says, exhibit to that one exactly what I have shown to you.

'Oh,' you say, 'I will do all that when I get out into the foreign field.' To talk in this way is like tyring to produce the munition of war in the trenches--you will be killed while you are doing it.

We have to go the 'second mile' with God. Some of us get played out in the first ten yards, because God compels us to go where we cannot see the way, and we say--'I will wait till I get nearer the big crisis.' If we do not do the runnig steadily in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis."

This is a calling. Now, I felt connections with this while I was interviewing - I guess, to me in a way, youth ministry is a mission field - just one of a different sort. Rather than bringing people across gaps of language and culture and other divisions of time and location, we are bringing them across an age barrier from youth to adulthood, or even from youth to adolescence (and does, interestingly enough, often include bits and pieces of the culture and language - but in different ways).