Weekly Magazine | The Benefits of Serving
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Dear Friends,
If you are like us, there are times when the last thing you want to do is serve. Sometimes people are ungrateful. Sometimes, you feel like one more obligation in your already busy schedule might be too much.
Besides that, this world tells us to put ourselves first. But Jesus offers a different invitation. In reading Sandy Mayle’s article below, we can be the hem of His garment, brushing close to the ground and available to anyone who reaches out.
That image she provided stopped us in our tracks this week. Not the spotlight, not the center stage, just… the hem. Overlooked, and yet the very place where healing flowed. This issue, we’re exploring what it really means to serve with a willing heart: how it sabotages selfishness, deepens worship, and draws us back into rhythm with the One we follow.
Encouraging you in God’s truth,
The Hem of His Garment | Sandy Mayle
What if serving isn't about what you bring to the table, but about being close enough to Jesus that His touch flows through you? Sandy Mayle uses Oswald Chambers' beautiful word picture of the hem of Christ's garment to reframe everything we think we know about what it means to serve.
Having a Servant's Heart in a Self-Love World | Erinn Karpovck
Life moves fast, and the pull to focus inward is constant. Erinn Karpovck explores how choosing to serve — really serve — breaks the cycle of selfishness, puts love on display, and transforms not just the people around us, but our own hearts.
Marrying Service and Solitude | Jean Fleming
Serving without stillness leads to exhaustion. Solitude without action leads to isolation. Jean Fleming explores how Jesus modeled a life in rhythm—work and rest, action and prayer—and what it looks like to let that rhythm shape our own.
Also:
The Hem of His Garment
What It Means to Be Available to the Needy.
By Sandy Mayle
My relationship with hems is problematic. Yes, those little folded edges sewn at the bottom of skirts or dresses. Oh, the arguments my sisters and I used to have with our mom, an accomplished seamstress, when she hemmed our clothing. Back then, miniskirts may have been in vogue… but not at our house!
Over the years, though, I grew to rely on Mom’s tailoring expertise. After her passing, I often pictured her laughing from heaven at my bumbling attempts with needle and thread—just to reattach a button. Hems? I do resort on rare occasion to hem tape (no sewing required). Outside of that, I just don’t do hems.
The Hem of His Garment
Oswald Chambers wrote about hems in his book So Send I You, which was compiled from lectures he gave at his missionary training college. Chamber’s words include us, as we carry out Christ’s mandate to “go and make disciples” (Matt. 28:19).
“When Our Lord is the Master of a disciple,” Chambers wrote, “no matter where he [or she] goes, His touch comes through [them] all the time. She only ‘touched the hem of His garment.’ The missionary is, as it were, the hem of His garment, and virtue goes out through the garment’s hem to the needy one who touched.”
Chambers is referring to the gospel story of the woman who suffered with chronic bleeding for twelve years (Mark 5:25–34). Despite seeing many doctors, suffering much, and spending all she had, she only got worse. But she heard about Jesus’s healing power and made her way through the crowd to come up behind Him and touch just the hem of His garment. And when she did, she was healed.
