God’s freedom delivers us from our own selfishness

It’s Serve Trip season for student ministry! This week we’re in Asheville, NC with our 9th-12th grade students, where there are fancy apartment buildings right across the street from shelters serving people who struggle with housing insecurity or are experiencing homelessness. I’m sure this isn’t the only town where such a dichotomy exists, but this is the reality we have been introduced to this week.

Today, a part of our group walked what’s called a Path of Awareness, where we walk the difficult paths that some of our neighbors walk on a daily basis. The first half of the day, we learned that there is only one footpath that leads into the city, which means the ability to get from outside of the city to resources downtown is a long and arduous walk in less than comfortable circumstances. We also learned that many spaces frequented by people experiencing home insecurity exist on the other side of an “invisible wall,” a wall that separates those who have the means to travel into the city via vehicle versus those who walk along this solitary footpath adjacent to a highway. Our morning walk was around 8,000 steps. It wasn’t pretty or glamorous, even though our walk took place with the Smokey mountains as the backdrop. By the end of our day, we had nearly doubled our number of steps and traipsed through the reality of what it means to go through a day without all of the privilege we walk around with on a regular basis. “Privilege” can be a divisive word these days, but when you walk where we walked, you realize exactly what privilege is and how we know we have it. We encountered people struggling with untreated mental health issues, substance use disorders, and people who had experienced too much month for their money. Each and every person we encountered is our neighbor.

In Galatians 5:13-14, Paul shares: “You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only don’t let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses, but serve each other through love. All the Law has been fulfilled in a single statement: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”

Today, we wrestled with that concept. With our freedom—our selfish desires—we wanted things like clean spaces to rest after walking so far, we wanted shade, and to be quite honest, some of us selfishly wanted to just do a job at one of our ministry worksites and feel the sense of accomplishment that comes from serving someone else and completing a task. However, what we did by taking this long, arduous walk was exactly what Paul described and we made an effort to “serve our neighbors in love.” We did this by greeting people as we walked past, stopping to talk when we would ordinarily keep walking by, seeing what our neighbors see, and also… truly seeing our neighbors.

It was a difficult journey and a different type of encounter than most of us usually have on serve trips, but one of the things our trip leaders pointed out is that we were doing what Jesus did when He walked the earth. Jesus walked along side others, He showed the outcasts of society love, He spoke to those whom others would rather ignore. So, while we WILL build wheelchair ramps on this trip, we WILL paint walls in churches, and we WILL share Christ’s love by serving others… I’m so grateful we got to spend some time and take a walk like Jesus did. I hope that as we wrestled with our selfish desires and privilege, our love for our neighbors shone through and radiated Christ. We’ve learned that there is ministry in simply seeing people and acknowledging everyone’s humanity and dignity.

As you walk through your day, how can you serve others with love? Who can you see that you normally might not? Who can you speak to like Jesus would? How can you love every neighbor?