Browsing Tag

Service

Bless Your Heart by Cindy Colley

Mama’s Kiss #74: Hospital Volunteers

Posted on November 1, 2024

As you know, if you’ve been reading, for quite some time, I’ve occasionally been running little installments called “Mama’s K.I.S.S.” I know that lots of readers could give many more and far more creative ideas than I can offer, but these installments are just a few tried and true and mostly old-fashioned ideas for putting service hearts in our kids.  This is number 71 of a list of one hundred ways we train our kids to serve. K.I.S.S. is an acronym for “Kids In Service Suggestions”.

There are few places that bring smiles to young servants in a more eternally fulfilling way than the hallways of hospitals. Truly!

There are a few hospitals here and there that still allow teens to deliver the mail to the residents in volunteer programs. Mostly, though, in our post-modern and post covid world, though, the “candy-stripers” have been replaced by corporate systems that are touted as efficient and safe.

But smart parents are always on the look out for ways to incorporate the sick and hurting into the monthly service regimes of their teen (and even younger) children. Enlist the help of your youth group or church service group to do some or all of the following:

1. Fill little dollar store plastic bins with snack crackers and cookies and water bottles and deliver them to the waiting areas in hospitals with notes of encouragement from your local congregation. Be sure you include directions to your building and contact information with the open offer of meeting with families for prayer.

2. Have your children adopt a floor or wing of the hospital for weekly visiting, room by room. Choose as  safely as possible, but this limited risk is so worth it for your kids.   There are areas of non-infection in most larger hospitals. Consider the NICU or the cancer patients.

3. Have your children make little “laundry lines”  with clothes-pins to attach to the walls of patients who will be staying for a few days, so that they can display their cards. Be sure to have the children go in and attach the first card on the little yarn “clothes-lines”  they have made. Of course, the way your children find out who is staying for a few days is by visiting their floor or wing and conversing. (Today’s privacy rules will not allow the hospital to divulge that information, but many patients are so happy to have visitors and talk about their diagnoses.)

4. Have your children take a couple of friends with them (or your family) and choose a hymn to sing in three of their rooms, monthly, to those who would like to listen or sing along. You can even take the words to the hymn and let the patients read along, but be sure to identify the church and give contact information on the lyrics sheet that you leave.

5. During the Christmas holidays, take a small gift ( a lotion, a candy cane, a little pop-up greeting card, or a little strand of lights for the bedside table–just any little happy gift) to the patients in which your children are “investing”.

The receivers will evolve and the faces will look different monthly, but the givers will respond consistently and their faces will turn ever more  heavenward!

Those who look to him are radiant,
and their faces shall never be ashamed. Psalm 34:5

Bless Your Heart by Cindy Colley

Mama’s K.I.S.S. #73–Teaching Kids to Teach Bible Classes

Posted on July 19, 2024

As you know, if you’ve been reading, for quite some time, I’ve occasionally been running little installments called “Mama’s K.I.S.S.” I know that lots of readers could give many more and far more creative ideas than I can offer, but these installments are just a few tried and true and mostly old-fashioned ideas for putting service hearts in our kids.  This is number 71 of a list of one hundred ways we train our kids to serve. K.I.S.S. is an acronym for “Kids In Service Suggestions”.

I remember well at the age of 15, becoming the teacher for the five-year-olds at the Adamsville church of Christ. I loved getting to teach and felt honored that the elders thought I could “handle that.” Of course the prequel to that was being the daughter of two people who were both actively teaching in the program and being called on to prepare materials and to be a part of many a cookout in our big yard for those who had achieved the attendance and memory work for their fifth grade year. My mom taught that grade and, every quarter, she planned a day at our house  for the students who were diligent throughout the quarter. (I was amazed at her funeral, how many came to me to tell me they still remembered her classes as the best of their lives, …”and she rewarded us with hot dogs at your house! That was soooo fun!”)

Growing up in a “culture” of teaching was hugely influential to the classes I was able to teach through the years, and to our family Bible times as our own kids were growing up.  I taught those five-year-olds until I left for college and it was a natural thing to sign up for teaching the four-year-olds with Miss Lora Laycook at the Henderson church when I went to Freed Hardeman University. From her, I learned invaluable tips and I honed skills. It was truly a joy to go in the basement of that old building Sunday after Sunday and watch a master teacher. I still sing songs with my grandchildren that I learned in that little room. Miss Lora spent  hours on hours each week making little clothespin dolls and cutting little robes out for their robes, making boxes for the kids to peek in as she told the story and making up songs that told the stories, musically. She was truly incredible, by the standards of college girls who had the privilege of observing and helping. Every semester there were two or three that had the blessing in that little concrete room in the basement. There was a never any curriculum bought…only a creative 80-year-old gentle woman with a meek spirit.

So for today and for “practical” get your pre-teens involved in helping you prepare for your Bible classes. If you aren’t teaching, get busy. I hear a lot of “…we just can’t find teachers.” Shame on the women in the kingdom when this is the case. We should be doing better; not just for our congregations, but specifically for our own children. It’s hard for us to show our own children the value of souls if we are too complacent to put any time into the most teachable, reachable souls in our own circles. 

If you haven’t been teaching,, go to your leaders and ask them to put you on the list. If you need to be in the classroom with a pro first, ask for that privilege. But whatever you do, stop showing your own kids the relative unimportance of little souls. Show the reality: Each child in the Bible school classroom has a soul that’s more important than all the money in all the pockets of all the millionaires of all the world, and, as for me and my household, we are determined to try to put Jesus in each one of those souls. Then get your own kids cutting and pasting and being part of the primary evangelism. 

You can do this. NOT doing it may be one of the most damning concessions you make in the area of service and evangelism to the little people in your house. 

 

Bless Your Heart by Cindy Colley

Mama’s K.I.S.S. #72–Lonely Birthdays

Posted on July 15, 2024

As you know, if you’ve been reading, for quite some time, I’ve occasionally been running little installments called “Mama’s K.I.S.S.” I know that lots of readers could give many more and far more creative ideas than I can offer, but these installments are just a few tried and true and mostly old-fashioned ideas for putting service hearts in our kids.  This is number 71 of a list of one hundred ways we train our kids to serve. K.I.S.S. is an acronym for “Kids In Service Suggestions”.

Most of you have monthly birthday lists in your church bulletins. Identify every person in your congregation who lives alone. Use the birthday list to mark a calendar or planner with the birthdays of each of these people. Your calendar entries can include college students, widows, unmarried, divorced people or young married people whose spouses are deployed. For the next year, determine that your children will visit each of these people on their birthdays with a small gift and cookies or a cake, sing “Happy Birthday” and be generous with the hugs. This is a game-changer for these people, but it’s also a really solid servant building block. Your children will make friends and there will be reciprocal encouragement.

Your children will receive thank-you notes often and the gift recipients will be looking for your kids at the services of the church. God will take the loaves and fishes that are these birthday remembrances and turn them into much good for a long time. When parents are providing transportation and helping with funding for these projects and, most especially, praying over each gift, God will do more than we are asking or imagining. (Ephesians 3:20) And there will be some happy birthdays in your neighborhood.

Bless Your Heart by Cindy Colley

Mama’s K.I.S.S. #71–Newswatch

Posted on June 28, 2024

As you know, if you’ve been reading, for quite some time, I’ve occasionally been running little installments called “Mama’s K.I.S.S.” I know that lots of readers could give many more and far more creative ideas than I can offer, but these installments are just a few tried and true and mostly old-fashioned ideas for putting service hearts in our kids.  This is number 71 of a list of one hundred ways we train our kids to serve. K.I.S.S. is an acronym for “Kids In Service Suggestions”.

Most of us don’t take time to watch the local news anymore. Some of us have community facebook groups that feature the local crises and even damage from disasters. Sometimes the stories of local fires, or even the stories of  nearby automobile accidents make the news. sometimes children who are victims are disease are featured when there are community outpourings of support.

Whichever medium you use. have your children listen up for a week and find a community family that may be encouraged by your families’ cards or gifts or food delivery. Have your children help make the cards or the food and take it to the family whose house burned or whose power is out from the storm.  They may even be able to help with clean-up after storm damage or for a family who has spent an extensive time away at a children’s hospital or rehab. It’s good for your kids to learn to look out for opportunities and it’s good for them to develop courage and poise in meeting strangers who may be in need. Be sure to study the relevant portion of Matthew 25 with them as you serve strangers. This one is about strangers you located on television or social media.

This is one worth repeating over and over. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you gained a Bible study through this outreach? You just might. But you WILL gain another level of a servitude in your child. Be sure you verbally encourage your child for the goodness he is showing. Be sure each child follows and participates in the process all the way through.

Bless Your Heart by Cindy Colley

Be Still and Know

Posted on June 24, 2024

Be Still and Know

Some days are just so crazy….You can’t accomplish much.

You ought to call a lonely sister, just to keep in touch. 

There’s someone with dementia who’s living life alone

And there’s a college student, being faithful on her own.

You should encourage that widow who sits just down the pew.

And help the mom who brings five kids. She does look up to you.

There’s Charlie, who’s a visitor and Sam, who’s homeless now.

You’ve planned to stop at the nursing home, but, oh…you don’t know how!

You juggle items on your list. So much is left undone. 

You try to be six places, but you barely cover one.

And every woman reading this, while rushing…running late…

To fill needs and plates and babies’ mouths….Each woman can relate. 

But if she’s made it to the Word and bowed her soul in prayer

She’s done the most important thing. The rest will still be there. 

So when the clock is chasing and the needs outrun resources, 

Remember that He’s ever-present and the best recourse is

To recognize the refuge…From the rush that is your foe.

In every anxious time of stress, to just be still and know. 

c. colley

 

God is our refuge and strength,

a very present help in trouble.

Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed,

and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;

Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled,

though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.

There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God,

the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.

God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved:

God shall help her, and that right early.

The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved:

he uttered his voice, the earth melted.

The Lord of hosts is with us;

the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.

Come, behold the works of the Lord,

what desolations he hath made in the earth.

He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth;

he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder;

he burneth the chariot in the fire.

Be still, and know that I am God:

I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

The Lord of hosts is with us;

the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah.

(Psalm 46)

Bless Your Heart by Cindy Colley

A Family

Posted on April 15, 2024

I had not been home in over a week. I’d traveled to Arkansas and then to Mississippi and a couple of different locations in that state. I had spoken four times and attended eleven services. I was so very thankful Saturday night to be getting in my own bed. I was going to look at the pictures of my grandchildren on the laptop on my own pile of clean pillows in my own room with my favorite person beside me.

I did look at my computer, but it was on my phone screen that I finally saw it when I searched for it using the  I-cloud find my app. I hate that feeling. But there it was in that little map, in Olive Branch Mississippi and it just makes me so mad that the Find My technology is so much smarter than I. I knew a seven hour trip was in my immediate  future. It was long. It was repetitive (especially Corinth.) For various reasons, I’ve been in Corinth. Mississippi five times in 9 days. It was one inconvenient trip, to say the least. I decided to leave straight from worship on Sunday morning. I knew I could be home by bedtime if I could stay awake to drive. I listened to singing and Bible lessons and only stopped for one fish sandwich and one  scoop of ice cream on the way there. I got to worship with my nephew, Job, on the way home. I kept my eyes open. But sometimes just barely.

But I will take away the lesson that my family (in Him) is the best family. This list!

Rebecca said “Oh, let me go get it for you. I do not mind at all. Landon and I will do something fun in Memphis. Isn’t that where Elvis’ house is?”

Sue said “My husband works at Fed-Ex. We can overnight that to you.”

Glenn said “If you can wait till Monday, I can go with you and we can walk through the antique store.” 

Tyler called and left a message “Oh no! I heard you left your laptop. We can come and meet you with it. Let us know where you are!”

Brittani said “Oh, I wish we had known. Robin and I love road trips. We coulda’ met you half way!” 

Cindy (someone I had never met before in the friendly Strickland church in Glen, MS, where I stopped in for evening services), said “Do you want to spend the night here? I know you are tired and I have this apartment. I would LOVE for you to stay!”

Not one of these people made offers that were not genuine. It’s a family. I take the family for granted sometimes. And then, sometimes, the fellowship is so real and its rewards are very palpable. On my way home, in the car, I was listening to a brother on a PTP thumb drive tell about how, during his son’s unexpected hospital stay and ultimate death, his grass was mysteriously mowed,  his bills were mysteriously paid,  and he was moved from an expensive cramped hotel room to an immaculate suite with every need being met. It even had a connected garage. God’s people are the Matthew 25 “inasmuch” people. For me, the prayers of sisters are the sweetest balm in all of my world. In view of my worthiness, I am the least of these.

I’m so thankful to be serving alongside the best servants on this planet! Your generosity and self-sacrifice are a huge comfort to this road-weary old woman!

And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? — When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? — Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me (Matthew 25:33-40).