Service at home

By Mia Pohlman

So many times, we focus on Jesus' Great Commission, in which he tells his disciples to go out into all the world to make disciples. Often, too, we focus on the ways in which the apostles dropped their lives and left the places of their birth to follow Jesus, going to new places to share his love.

This is all beautiful; I think there are times in many of our lives when we are asked to go, to step out in faith and take God's love with us as we travel to new places and new people.

Sometimes, though, we are asked to return, to go back to where we are from and be God's love there.

The moments in Scripture in which people are asked to return don't usually get as much fanfare. They are quieter moments depicting cameo characters within Scripture, since the Gospel writers didn't stick around to see how the stories played out. But the writers do record Jesus' command to go back, to do the all-important work of loving the person's own family, old friends and acquaintances.

I love what Jesus says through this command: serving our families and the people of the places we are from is important, too.

I recently read one such instance in Mark 5:1-20, called "The Healing of the Gerasene Demoniac." This story focuses on a man who has known suffering: he cries out night and day, his grief so deep he hurts himself with stones, bruising his own skin. He is a man who is so far cut off from society that corpses are his only community; he lives among the tombs. The townspeople's only interaction with him is to try to contain him so he is visible as little as possible; they even resort to shackling and chaining him. Perhaps we, too, can identify with these townspeople's apathy, fear and genuine inability to know where to start in helping this man because his problems seem so deep.

And then Jesus comes. He is unafraid of this man, unafraid of the demons who have ruled his life. Jesus asks the name of what has been tormenting the man and then heals him, setting him free.

The man begs to go with Jesus. But Jesus tells him: "Go home to your family and announce to them all that the Lord in his pity has done for you" (Mark 5:19 NAB). The man obeys, and the people he goes back to are "amazed" at God. This man becomes an evangelist in the place he is from.

This comes, too, after Jesus has been to his own hometown, rejected by the community there. No doubt, Jesus understands the difficulties associated with serving in one's native community. Still, he asks the man to go back because the people where he is from need to know the love of the Father, too. Jesus knows this man is the person for the job.

Jesus' different calls throughout Scripture show us: there's not one "right" path to serving God. God loves through who we are, where we are from and our individual stories of healing, leaving, returning. He asks us to love our families, friends and coworkers right around us. All we have to do is be willing to say yes.