Quick question.
What would you do if someone walked up to you with a plate and announced “you can make me an egg.”
Laugh or roll your eyes at their seeming joke? Get some variation of frustrated, irritated, or mad that their audacious entitlement?
And curious minds want to know if you’d stop what you were doing and head to the kitchen!
I did. Why? Because this is normal when a 29-year-old special needs Princess thinks she rules the kingdom otherwise known as our house.
(FYI, the same morning she also said “I’ll let you do my laundry.”)
Now, with her developmental delays and autistic behaviors, sometimes words don’t come out the way she intended… which means I have to–no, choose to–believe she was trying to ask for help meeting a basic need because she was hungry and her favorite T-shirt was dirty.
What’s also true is that I don’t always respond with grace or patience or kindness. (Hey, I’m human!)
In fact, I still remember the morning a few years ago when one similar demand followed quickly on the heels of another and then another with no thought to if I had other things I needed to get done or was still getting over a cold. Or that her father was sitting right there on the couch in the same room!
Somehow I managed to bite my tongue and escape to the bathroom where I could safely vent and cry and think all the nasty things I’d been bottling up inside.
“What am I? Your servant? Was I put on this earth just to serve you?”
Then a still small voice said, “Yes.”
Gut. Check.
Because Jesus said that whoever wants to be great among you must be the servant of all. And then He set the ultimate example of humbling himself and washing feet. Of letting go of His rights and loving others more than his own life.
In serving my family and especially our princess, Jesus wasn’t asking me to do anything He hadn’t already done.
Let that soak in a minute.
Over time, “I live to serve” became my new motto. (Even if some days I just might say it or think it with more than a dash of snark while shoving clothes into the washing machine and scrambling an egg.)
Serving is hard work. It’s messy and inconvenient and can sometimes demeaning. Just ask a mother. Or a nurse.
Or the wait staff at the corner cafe.
Grinning here, because serving is something the characters in my upcoming Cafe on Hope and Main series will have to learn. And the hero of book one is not ready for the reality on day one!
So, as we all learn to better serve each other, maybe “The Servant Song” from the Maranatha Promise Band can become your anthem too?
What about you? Who did you/can you serve today? And would you like your eggs scrambled or over easy?
