Serving Then, Serving Now

By Faith Hoyt

When we reach out, empathize, and express care, we tap into God’s love, weaving it into our relationships. More than ever, people need to experience this empathy, this love, when we minister to them. Irecently asked my friends on social media to share what they learned about service and outreach in 2020. The first response was an encouraging reminder: “That it can still be done under social distancing conditions.” One friend shared, “It's personal now, not just collective.

It is me reaching out to the people in my own neighborhood.” Another expressed, “I can go beyond what I thought I was capable of to reach others and serve where I am called or needed.” (This last statement was shared by a frontline worker for a small hospital in Stanislaus County, Calif.)

The responses as a whole give me a picture of our experiences in 2020 and how the crisis expanded our understanding of and challenged our approach to serving others.

When the reality of the pandemic sank in last spring, so did the reality that helping the hungry, the lonely, and the oppressed would be more challenging than before. As one of my friends acknowledged, “We took the daily opportunities and ease of doing it for granted.” That’s certainly true for me. Initially, the changes brought on by COVID challenged my involvement in outreach. Since March of 2020, “one has to get creative when it comes to reaching people,” as Serving Then, another friend put it. And people did get creative. Families rallied to show support to the frontline workers they know. Teachers hosted Sabbath School online for their students. Pastors read books to their young people on Facebook. Homeless Serving Now ministry volunteers scraped up enough PPE to safely pass out food and hygiene kits to the most vulnerable. Slowly and surely, we found ways to continue serving. In the throes of all our adapting, it was a relief to me that one form of service didn’t change, and that’s prayer. In the moments when I felt disconnected from my community or helpless to provide for those in need, I remembered what I learned from Shirley, a matriarch of my childhood church in El Dorado County, Calif. Shirley had a notebook with pages covered from top to bottom in penciled cursive. Every line was a prayer for someone she knew or had heard about. Shirley prayed as a way to serve others, and in the process, she set an example for me. She’s the reason for the notebook I keep on my desk. I recently read that relating to one another is a spiritual activity—when we reach out, empathize, and express care, we tap into God’s love, weaving it into our relationships. More than ever, people need to experience this empathy, this love, when we minister to them. These are important ingredients in service. I like the way one of my friends put it: “Everybody has a story, a deeply challenging situation that they have gone through or overcome, or bizarre circumstances that give them a very different perspective on the world than my own. I can’t force people to see things my way though, so I have to try and see the world as they see it before I can truly reach them.” I’m eager to participate more in this exciting, humbling, introspective thing called service. I want my own approach to reflect what I learned from this past year—that the heart of service is love. Whether life “goes back to normal” or maintains its new characteristics, we are still called to serve. As a bonus, we have a lot of adapting and innovating under our belt now. And the opportunities are still limitless.

_______________________________________ Faith Hoyt is the communication specialist for the Pacific Union Conference.