Communion Trays

If you're like me, you have days where you're just simply crabby. And, if you're like me, these days are often preceded by a night on which you stayed up far too late. Today was such a day for me.

It's New Years Day, so obviously I was up late last night. And, this being a Sunday, I was up early this morning and off to church. This, coupled with some unknown causes, created my crabby mood.

Being crabby makes it difficult to focus on worshipping the Lord, but I did my best through the first half of the service. Then came the sermon. Terry spoke about how God had shown him that there are two kinds of people in the church: collection plates and communion trays.

• Collection plates are about themselves. They look for only what they can get out of church and out of Christ. They spend their time focused on their needs and their struggles and their trials, looking for people to fill them up.
• Communion trays, on the other hand, are about others. They are made up of crushed fruit and broken bread, but they spend their time looking for ways to use their brokenness to bless those around them. Their focus is on Christ and how their lives might be emptied in order to bring Him glory and bless His children.

So, there you have it.

Now let me give you some back story to the rest of this.

There is a group at our church called Project Tulsa with a mission to serve the homeless people in our city. Since the middle of the summer, a group of us has gone downtown every Sunday afternoon with food and water bottles to hand out. We have made countless friends at the homeless shelters, and they have become a joy to us.

Okay, back to the story.

As I drove home from church, I wrestled back and forth with whether or not to come back to the church after lunch and go with the group downtown. Since I was crabby, I really just wanted to go home and take a nap. But I felt the Lord calling me, saying, "No, go spend time with your friends downtown. Go spend time with Me downtown. Quit being a collection plate. I expect you to be a communion tray." So downtown I went.

We cooked and wrapped 300 hot dogs and loaded up a dozen or so cases of water and soda, and seven of us took off on our weekly rounds.

We were at our last stop before I realized what happened. I was sitting with my friend on the bumper of one of our suburbans, each of us with a pile of hot dogs in our laps. We called out to everyone who walked past and offered them what we had. We laughed with one man who came back five times for another hot dog and teased him about the Pillsbury Dough Boy on his t-shirt. We greeted our friends and asked how their weeks had gone. We prayed with strangers. We smiled and laughed and loved. And suddenly it hit me: I wasn't crabby anymore.

How? How is such a thing possible? The wisdom of the world would tell us that if we're crabby, the best way to fix our mood is to focus on our own needs and take care of ourselves, then we'll feel better. But God's wisdom is different. He tells us to focus on others, to take what already feels spent and spend more, to take what is already empty and pour it out. And somehow, as we empty and pour and spend...we find ourselves fuller than when we started.

As we begin this new year, may we all learn to shed our collection-plate ways and assume the attitude of communion trays. May we be emptied and poured out and utterly spent for the sake of His Kingdom. And at the end of the year, may we be more filled with Him than we could ever have dreamt.

"For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Me will save it." Luke 9:24