Serve the Lord

“Serve the Lord with gladness: come before His presence with singing.” Psalm 100:2

Sometimes it is difficult to serve the Lord with gladness. These are deeply troubled times and it often seems like the world is on the brink of a collapse. We seem to be perched on a precipice and when we look down, it spells disaster. If we stay where we are, it’s also very precarious. Yesterday my sister showed me a video which impressed me deeply. It was a BBC documentary about a family of barnacle geese. The mother goose plants her eggs high up to avoid the Arctic Fox feeding on them. But when it comes time for the goslings to eat grass, the mother calls to the goslings to follow her from 120 to 450 m. down the rocky crags. The goslings have no wings yet, so they tumble down and hit themselves several times on the sharp face of the cliff. It is very hard to watch this painful descent and I got surprised that any of the goslings survived.

When we feel the pain and pathos of our people, the hunger, the devastation of their crops and homes after typhoon Ompong, the lack of books and schoolhouses and good teachers who know right from wrong, the injustice that fills our jails with the innocent, the sexual trafficking of women rampant in the provinces, the use of little children and even babies by their parents for pornography here in our country, abuses by the clergy, etc.....where do we start to serve? What can we do? The task is insurmountable. 

Like Mother Teresa and the saints, we need only to serve the Lord in our little corner of the world. Mother Teresa said, “Not all of us can do great things.  But we can do small things with great love.” We may not be able to solve world hunger but we may feed a poor child begging in the street. 

“I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world.” May we all be little pencils in the hand of God. We can leave the big, horrible problems of this world to a God who takes care of even little goslings tumbling down a precipice. We can trust Him to take care of our people, our country and our Church. We just need to be available for Him to use, to put our gifts at His disposal, where we are.