Small Acts of Service

If it were up to me, my bed would never get made.

But the fact is that I got married, and so I now make the bed.

I make the bed because one of my wife’s love languages (as described in Gary Chapman’s famous book The 5 Love Languages) is “acts of service.” And one of the things my wife enjoys in life is crawling into a perfectly made bed each night.

And so, despite my own thoughts, feelings, and inclinations, I’ve become a bed-maker. It’s something small, something simple, and something entirely ordinary, but it’s something my wife enjoys, so I do it to serve her.

And this, I think, is more or less what Christian life looks like.

You see, sometimes we get to participate in big, flashy, monumental acts of service. For instance, over the years I’ve had the privilege of helping raise large amounts of money to send to underprivileged communities, both in North America and across the world. I’ve also been able to go on and help lead short-term and long-term service trips. And I’ve been invited into the lives of our friends, family members, and neighbors to serve them in one-off, bigger ways over the years too.

But recently I’ve been thinking that it’s not always the big, flashy, monumental moments of service that matter. Those are great, and they’re no doubt important when they come along, and we should certainly say “yes” to them when they do.

Yet it seems to me that often it’s the small acts of service that matter more. It’s the regular string of simple service opportunities that are more important to say “yes” to. And it’s the mundane, ordinary acts of service that, over time, make more of a difference.

First, those small acts of service often matter more to those we’re in closest relationship with (our family members, friends, church community, neighbors, and even the total strangers we regularly cross paths with). Second, though, those small acts of service also train us to be ready to say “yes” when the bigger, more monumental acts of service come.

So I’ve been trying to say “yes” more regularly to the small acts of service God puts in front of me. Those, I think, in the grand scheme, are what the Christian life, or at least part of it, really amounts to. It amounts to serving others in small ways, so that I can be ready to serve them in big ways, just like Christ did for me.

You know, like making the bed.