"There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear."

So, today i turned in my application to Chic-fila. Haven't heard back from Starbucks or Harris Teeter yet.

You know the ladies in Chic-fila? The oldish ones who refill your drinks and don't expect tips and are always nice and smiling? i like them. They embody what service is all about, if you asked me. "Oh, but I didn't ask you," you say. Just pretend.

Here's the thing. What if we as Christians really were people who lived life without a constantly self-centered focus? What if we walked into a restaurant and instead of being as belligerent as we possibly could toward the waiter or waitress--you know, because it's their job to get our order right--we tried to make their job as easy as we possibly could, and gave a good tip regardless of the job they did? What if we didn't view relationships in light of what the other person was bringing to the table, what they could do for us, how they could make us feel, and instead approached the person with a sincere desire to know how we could serve them? What if we stopped talking so much about love and just did love?

Somewhere along the way, i think the Christian life for a lot of Americans has become a sort of cat and mouse game with ourselves. We can think almost constantly about how we relate to God and how much God loves us and how we can become more spiritual and we have a false humility about our failures such that we keep on and on about them and how God has rescued us from them and introspection and soul-searching are constant musts and how do i look when i sing songs and when is it right to say something during prayer and why is it that she doesn't say the things i say and i'm not hypocritical, just free in Christ....

Do you see what can happen? Before we know it, we have stopped thinking so much about God's grace and started looking at our spirituality as if it were some sort of beauty contest. If we do happen to serve, it's only so we earn more points in the swimsuit competition, you know, the part everyone sees. To be sure, we must all have the willingness to grow personally and to deal with sin and to strive for intimacy with Jesus, but God talks so much more about doing unto others than He does about thinking of our own spiritual appearance.

The model of service Jesus gave us is as follows: He washed the filthy feet of Judas just before his even dirtier lips betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver.