Perspective

This week has been a great week. I have spent it in a retirement home in Santa Ana, California. I have loved getting to know the residents here. So many of them have spent their lives in faithful service to Him. They are an inspiration to me. I have met people who have served Him here in the US, Japan, Mali, Gabon, and the Philippines. If you ask them if they would do it all over again, they would not hesitate to say yes.

Yesterday I read a blog entry by John Piper. In it he wrote about David Livingston, who gave his life to serve in Africa. Livingston once said the following to a group of Cambridge students about leaving the “benefits of England.”

For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. . . . Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger, now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

My friends here in the retirement center have talked a bit about some of the difficulties they faced while serving Him over the years. In my opinion, they have faced many a hardship. However, while talking to them I have found that they, like Livingston, found service to be a privilege, not a sacrifice.

I hope that after I retire, I too would be able to look back at my life in light of eternity and say that serving Him was a privilege and not a sacrifice.