In Service We Encounter God
Radical
servanthood does not make sense unless we introduce a new level of
understanding and see it as the way to encounter God. To be humble and
persecuted cannot be desired unless we can find God in humility and
persecution. When we begin to see God, the source of all our comfort and
consolation, in the center of servanthood, compassion becomes much more
than doing good for unfortunate people. Radical servanthood, as the
encounter with the compassionate God, takes us beyond the distinctions
between wealth and poverty, success and failure, fortune and bad luck.
Radical servanthood is not an enterprise in which we try to surround
ourselves with as much misery as possible, but a joyful way of life in
which our eyes are opened to the vision of the true God who chose to be
revealed in servanthood. The poor are called blessed not because poverty
is good, but because theirs is the kingdom of heaven; the mourners are
called blessed not because mourning is good, but because they shall be
comforted.
Here we are
touching the profound spiritual truth that service is an expression of
the search for God and not just of the desire to bring about individual
or social change.
Henri Nouwen
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