The Purpose Driven Life ranks personally for me today as still one of the most impactful studies on Christianity I have ever done.  Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church has such a gift and an ease by which he explains things that it just made sense to me.  One of the things he mentions in the book is about ministry.  I’ve copied and pasted his summary here for you:

  • “We begin to understand how God means for us to serve when we understand our SHAPE: our Spiritual gifts, Heart, Abilities, Personality, and Experience (p236-256).”

Honestly I’m not real good at a lot of things but my wife and I do have a passion for kids and one of the comments I continuously hear when people view my home is how kid-friendly it is.  Unconsciously we built a lot of game playing into it and as word spread it wasn’t long before we started having kids over 24/7 beginning on Friday evening.  Just to put it into perspective, we have 4 children and it isn’t uncommon to have 2-5 others spending the night during the weekend.  I love cooking for them too and our griddle or grill is either on, preheating or getting cleaned.

It wasn’t until my wife told me one day, “you know that’s what our ministry is right?- serving kids…”  that it occurred to me that this is what I can do to make a difference.  So this past weekend for example, we had 8 kids in our house and spent our entire weekend taking care of them.  I took them to Top Golf, we cooked for them, took them to Church and finally to their basketball tournament.  Admittedly it was a busy weekend and we’re not always up for that but it’s our sincere hope that we can set a good enough example to them and our children to always try to serve as best you can, in a manner that works for you.  At Mattern & FitzGerald yes we build homes but really what goes on inside of them is the most important thing.  Try to understand what you are good at, then use that to minister to others in a way that only you can.