Serve
After reaching out to give hope, establishing belief, and inspiring people to take action, service or serving them is the next fundamental thing to do. A lot of times, we create events to reached out to people, we go where they are, give them some ‘goodies’, but afterwards we leave. Then the next time you come back, you see them again to the same state the first time you saw them. So what happened? You end up thinking there’s no hope for them. You give up on them. It’s their fault, they don’t get it.
That’s why it is very important to understand the foundation of ‘Reach’ - giving people the light of hope, planting the seed of belief, and inspiring them to take action. As you can see clearly, the person reaching out is performing another fundamental action to the transformation of that person being reached out. Service.
By practicing the foundation to ‘Reach’, the person reached is being strenghtened and the natural product of this is to be able to do the same thing to another person who has a need. They will soon realize that they were transformed and they want to do the same thing to another person.
Just like Reach, we need to understand the foundation of ‘Serve’ or service.
- Why
- Give
- Value
Why or purpose. The fundamental cornerstone of service is the realization that God has a purpose for our life. For some people, they spend their entire life trying to discover their purpose and they visualize something huge that they have to perform for God. Let me make it very simple. Our purpose in life is to serve God. That’s just it. I don’t care how you want to dissect, study or analyze it. He made us to serve Him. Serving Him also meant serving His creation or other people.
Think about it, we came to this earth as an infant born from parents who served us by providing our needs so that we can grow healthy and strong. We go to school and our teachers are serving us to make us learn something. We go to work doing something for our boss, we are serving our boss. God created us to serve His creation. It is built in our being.
Give. Guiding people to discover God’s purpose for them, takes us to an understanding of giving. Our purpose determines why we do things. Giving shows us who we are. All of us have something to give because we have been given a ‘gift’ by God. It could be a talent, a strenght or a trait. Whatever it may be, God has created us to give something. Understanding the purpose would easily show you what you can give for His glory.
Value. Whatever we give, we must understand that it should add value to another person. We have been programmed by society to take away value from another person and hoard it for ourselves. One must realize that by giving value to another person adds value to the giver. Think about that for a moment. How could that be? When you give the light of hope to a person in the dark moments of their life, you have allowed them to see once again. To that person, no matter how faint that light is, you’re worth more than what you think you are.
Again, I go back to the example that Jesus Christ showed us. He reached out to us, giving us a sacrifice a lot of us don’t understand. He served us by showing us that He have a purpose for God’s glory, an extreme sacrifice to redeem us back to His presence. He gave His life for the redemption of our soul which showed us who He is. He gave value to us by showing us that we are worthy to be with Him.
Now that you understand the core principles that this organization adheres to, I hope that I am able to give you inspiration to do the same thing in our daily lives. We don’t need to be a member of an organization to be able to perform these things. It is God given. Understand that this is not a one shot event. It is an on-going process.
Discover your purpose, give to empower, and add value to someone’s life.
Reach - Why?
I continue on to the core value of Reach & Serve. I would like to discuss my definition of ‘Reach’ in this organization.
In everyone’s life, there comes a time or period of trial, hardship, struggle, etc. During this tiimes, we either express it or not. We either know why it happen or we can’t fathom why this happened to us. Have you been in that situation? Or you are in this situation right now! You are working on a solution but it does not seem to get you anywhere. There is a lot of emotions going through this period of time - resentment, anger, frustrations, etc. And none of them is desirable. I know the feeling because I have been there.
I would like to share with you the 3 pillars or foundation of ‘Reach’:
- Hope
- Believe
- Action
Hope. The very first thing we would like to give to someone in a period of trial is hope. Without hope there is no faith. Hope is the cornerstore of faith. We must realize that hope lights up the mind and brings peace to the life of that person.
Believe. With faith comes belief. We brought in the light of hope, now we restore the belief system of the person. This is a process of restoration and renewal of our thoughts and mind.
Action. Inspire people to take action. Hoping and believing requires action but this is about change. Decide to take action to change.
I see a lot of organizations reaching out. They go out to some place, give certain things to people, then leave. Then they go back to those places and see that nothing fruitful is being achieved. It is still the same way the last time they saw them. And they get frustrated. We must understand that reaching out to others is a relationship. This is not just a one time event, leave, move on with our lives, then go to another one.
We have to learn from what our Lord Jesus Christ did and exemplified. He came down from heaven to bring us hope - the hope of reconciliation and redemption with our creator. With his teachings and examples, he tries to restore our belief system that was clouded by the devil. Yet, it is up to us to take action and come back to Him. Although He demonstrated the extreme sacrifice for all of us and showed that He went back to heaven, He did not leave us alone. We have the Holy Spirit to guide us, to walk with us, to establish a continuing relationship with God.
When you reach out, care.
We’re Finally Live!
We finally made it! After several tweaks and configuration, we have finally created Reach & Serve’s blog site. I decided to start Reach & Serve as a blog site to make it more open. We will eventually have the website running soon but we will be starting this as a blog.
I believe a little bit of introduction about the site is in order. Not to make this blog a novel, but Reach & Serve is actually the Lord’s answer to my prayer for purpose. Later on, I believe I should write an eBook on the Lord’s work in my life.
The past year and a half was a struggle both spiritually and financially. But the Good Lord was gracious enough to carry me through all these trials. The Lord has put me on a situation where it was just Him and me, one on one. I know for most of us, we don’t want to be in this kind of situation of trial. However, one must realize that if the Lord is going to use us, you HAVE to go through the fire, being pruned, shaped up, strenghtened for His purpose. We fail to realize that God wants to use us for His purpose. Not that he is happy we are suffering but I believe it is the exact opposite. I am a father of two wonderful children and there are a lot of times that I hurt when I know that they don’t listen to me although I know for a fact that what I ask them to do is for their own good. What do you do? You eventually try to talk to them one one one. I honestly believe that this is also true with our Father in heaven.
A week before last year’s Thanksgiving, while watching Joel Osteen’s worship service, I wept like I’ve never had ever done in my life and finally received God’s purpose and peace in my life. With my struggle in searching for a breakthrough, I finally found peace. Christmas was seen on a different light and you get to understand the true meaning of His coming down from heaven to earth.
For several days, I would woke up early morning to hear two very distinct words in my mind - reach and serve. Most importantly, the underlying principles for Reach & Serve was very clear. Reach was about ‘Hope, Believe, Action’; Serve was about ‘Why, Give, Value’. I would go into the details of this concepts later on but at those moments I believe that was my purpose in life.
I am a computer consultant and has been shifting my career into wealth planning (more on this later on). I thought for sometime that God was leading me to a new career. I should have known better. He has shown me that my technical abilities and the preparation that he has made for my real estate knowledge is going to be used for His purpose.
Initially, I designed Reach & Serve as a platform for the promotion of financial awareness. The vision was to transform financial challenges to financial freedom. The mission is to give the light of hope and share the knowledge of wealth. However, as days passed, the purpose for this website has gradually evolved as an extension of my ministry in our church. By the way, I served as the technical lead person for our church (Charisma Life Church) media ministry in Pomona, California.
I believe the mission is still to give the light of hope. But the vision is now to inspire people to care. As Christians, we go to bible studies and get ourselves immersed with the study of the Word of God, but most of the time, we stop there. We get information overloaded that we fail to translate what we learned to how we can apply what the Holy Spirit is leading us to do.
There is nothing wrong with studying but I believe even the devil knows that there is God. And they know that Jesus Christ died for our sins. But what we do with that knowledge and how we inspire other people to believe that God loves them and that Jesus Christ died for our sins, is the start of the battle. Just as the darkness clouds during the storms of our life, the Sun does not fail to shine either during those times. Most of the times, we forget that darkness is nothing but the absence of light. You can not bring darkness; you take out the light to make darkness.
I hope to use this website as an inspirational launch pad for people committed to changing their lives. That truly God loves them inspite of whatever circumstances they are going through right now.
We are now working on making Reach & Serve as a non-profit organization and my sincere thanks to a CPA, Mr. Raul Castillo, for providing his services to make this a reality. We will keep you posted on this development. I am also hoping to have my brother in law who is pastoring a church in Singapore to step in as a contributor on this website.
We are now moving forward and watch out for the next series of articles that we will post in the website. I cannot do this alone. Yet one person at a time, we can make a difference.
Till next….