Be Different

Years ago, I served with a team of volunteers at a ninety-day rehabilitation center for drug and alcohol addiction. After cooking and serving the meal, we left the kitchen, picked up a plate, and received our food as well.

Then we sat at tables to eat lunch with the clients. We exchanged greetings and smiles across the tables. As I leaned over to take my first bite, a gentleman said, “You all are different.”

Glancing up from the meal, I wondered what he meant by that statement. I asked him, “What do you mean, different?”

He responded, “There are a lot of churches, businesses, and other groups that come in here to feed us, but you all are the only ones who eat with us.”

Every Monday in the season of Lent, join me for a faithful story and a simple step in serving God and loving neighbor well.

This week, be different. Move beyond the kitchen, sit down at the table, extend God's love, and eat with a stranger or a neighbor in need.

Spiritual Resources

Scriptures

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. Romans 12:1-2, The Message The Son of Man has come eating and drinking Luke 7:34a, The New Revised Standard Version

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