I was raised in a culture where the younger serves the older and the older ‘rules’ over the younger. That all changed for me, when one day, post secondary school, my younger sister ‘sent’ me to do something for her.
In our culture, younger people don’t ‘send’ people older than them to do things. It’s the other way around. So it was only not surprising, but also way out of line for her to ‘send’ me, her older sister, to do something for her.
Little background needed here.
When we were growing up, I considered my younger sister a minx because she was always doing things to upset me. In retrospect, I see it was her way of getting her always ‘holed-up in a book’ sister to interact with her, especially as we were the only two kids at home at the time. All our siblings had grown up and left.
Yet, her methods of drawing me in seemed irritating and hurtful to me. Like, she would poke or pinch me, or pull something out of my possession. As a result, I always found her troublesome and was always reporting her to my dad (I was not a fighting or retaliatory person, so reporting her was my best response). All this changed one day.
One day, having had my ‘peaceful’ existence, once again painfully intruded upon by her, I went to report her to my dad. My dad whose m.o. on correcting us was to lecture us rather than spank us, launched into a totally new lecture I’d never heard before. It went like this…
“She is your younger sister, as such, it is your job to look after her. So try not to be irritated by her, but overlook her faults.”
Upon hearing those words that day, something shifted in me. For the first time, I felt what it was like to feel responsible for another human being. From that time on, I became the person who defended her before accusers, even when she was at fault. I argued her case before elder siblings and parents. I confronted anyone who treated her in any way I felt was unloving.
This role of responsibility and protector, kicked into another gear when I asked Jesus into my heart the summer I turned eleven. You see, although I felt responsible and protective towards her now, I didn’t stop feeling irritated by her (typical older sister, huh?).
Then the summer I turned eleven, I asked Jesus into my heart after reading T.L. Osborne’s book, “How To Be Born Again.” When I knelt down to pray and ask Jesus into my heart after reading that book, something shifted in my heart and I knew I was a new creation. But I didn’t know just how much of a new creation I was until I was confronted with my little minx of a sister.
Suddenly, all I could feel and would ever feel towards her was this wave of love. It was different from the feeling of protectiveness and responsibility, and it was what set the stage for the permanent counter-cultural shift in our relationship. Our relationship would never be the same again and would never, ever fit into the guidelines of traditional elder-younger relationship after this. But I didn’t know it until the summer I graduated high school. That was the summer she ‘sent’ me on an errand for her. The summer she did something so counter-cultural at the time, that we were both stunned by the outcome.
Heart full of love for her, I did not even think twice about obliging her request. The result is that she was so shocked I actually did, that she commented and said “Wow, thank you! I didn’t know you’d actually do it!”
I remember being struck at how affirmed she felt. It felt like I had just given her a gift that greatly pleased her.
That moment would always mark the shift for me in recognizing that serving others, both great and small, was a way of loving them. It would mark the opening for me to understand, accept and practice Jesus’ example and command in John 13:14,
Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.
Jesus’ action and command was not about servitude, but about love. The kind of love that communicates to another they are worthy by subverting traditional, cultural, and societal concepts of worth.
This understanding would later set the stage for and enable me to enter Christ’s ministry aka affirming the worth of others by serving them through organized church ministry. It would open the door to find out how I could ‘serve’ those in my sphere of orbit. My innate posture of loving others became “How can I serve you/her/him/them?”
Yet, there’s a catch…service as love is so counter-cultural and subversive that many cannot relate to it, and rather stick to the cultural understanding of ‘service’ and ‘servant’ by regarding and treating the one who serves them as less-than, rather than recognizing they (recipient of service) are being affirmed and found worthy.
What would happen if everyone could catch Jesus’ understanding of service as love, such that we went around serving one another and appreciating those who serve us, rather than denigrating them and their service?
Kaleidoscope Christian 