To be a leader, one must be a servant as well

I am serving as a leader of a small group of young working adult in my church. And in the company I am now working at, I am also required at times to use that authority as leader when requiring assistance or help from others of lower working level position.

Frankly speaking, I am still struggling to humble myself before people (especially in church/Life-Group). I am not like many leaders in my church where they are so humble and down to earth. The way it works in church and in my company is quite different. In my company I expect people to do what I want and deliver what is required of them, in a simple term, I have the right to be served. But in church or if I can kindly use the term the kingdom of heaven, as a leader I need to serve instead of being served.

And that's one of my struggle till this very moment, to continually humbling myself and serve my friends, and if possible without people noticing so that I won't have anyone complimenting the works I have done.

Tonight I cooked quite a beautiful food as dinner for the guys in the core team of my group (4 of them). As I have shared, I don't really like to serve people, so when I went shopping I was thinking if I should just cook noodles for them or something nice. Then I said to myself, I shouldn't think so much of the money I spent as I have never been in lack financially (that God always provide). So I cooked a nice seafood pasta.

Tonight, we actually had training for the people in timothy class (those we're training to join the core team in our group) to lead discussion. So after dinner, I quickly washed whatever I could before the discussion. And after discussion, I washed the rest of the plates and glasses.

I was so tempted after discussion to ask one of the guys to wash the rest of the dishes, but then I felt the holy spirit asking me to complete it and said, "Do you want to be a good example to them? You need to learn to serve as a leader. Since you already cooked dinner for them, why don't you complete your serving tonight by also washing everything?"

I was like, ah... *sighing*
Yes, then I remember an occasion where Jesus said that HE came not to be served, but to serve.

Strangely enough, I felt so satisfyingly awesome after washing all the dishes. How true it is, to be a leader, one must be a servant as well. In the kingdom of God, the only way up is down. When you humble yourself, then God will lift you up.

The reason I shared this with you is not so that you know I've done something great, in fact it's actually nothing, but just to say that I feel for you if you also have the same struggle as I do. But continue to learn to humble yourself. I'm still far from being such a humble person, let alone a humble leader. So I hope I can encourage you to continue to serve others.