By Alexis Patterson

For many years now, I have spent a great deal of my life committed to customer service. In the professional world, we are taught the famous phrase “the customer is always right.” Being in an industry that competed for the business and patronage of consumers, I began to loathe the idea that the customer was always right, especially when the customer was rude, arrogant, egotistical and flat-out mean. I felt powerless, lesser than and beneath the thumb of people who were often painted to be the reason my job even existed. “The customer is king,” industry leaders would often say; but I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around how such poor behavior and greediness would be considered the rule and the way. To this day, I can’t say I agree with the notion that who holds the dollar holds the key, but what I do know is that unlike the service the world demands of us, service that God has called us to benefits His kingdom and the entire world. For starters, a beautiful thing is God doesn’t demand, but invites. 

We are invited by our great God to use our time, talents and treasures to serve one another. Service to others through the gifts that God has given us brings us into communion with God and man. We serve one another willingly, remembering that it is God who gets all the glory. I love how Henry Blackaby says, “We are to develop a servant attitude of Christ that requires humility and obedience.” Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, do from the heart, as something done for the Lord and not for people.” I look at service done unto others as an invitation to meet with God who is already at work around me. 

Unlike what the world presents, serving others is an opportunity to see how big our God is. As I serve in ministry, I get the opportunity to see God through the lenses of other people. I am stretched to see God bigger and more uniquely than just the way He appears and moves in my life, and it gives me hope! I am so blessed to see God being very personal to me and personal to others simultaneously. Serving is a way of being generous. We are able to give back what God has given us without growing weary. Galatians 6:9 says. “Let us not grow weary of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.” 

There is so much promise of God’s goodness when we serve Him by serving others. Jesus, our perfect example, did this so beautifully with His time on earth. He became the least of us so that God the Father would be glorified. When we serve Christ’s way, we become servants of His people, showing love, compassion, peace, gentleness and joy. 

If you offer yourself to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted one, then your light will shine in the darkness, and your night will be like noonday. 

Isaiah 58:10