Christ-followers are servants!

We want to raise Ethan in a culture where serving God and others is part of the DNA. A culture where serving God/others is part of the DNA is a culture which says …

It’s not about me!

Rick Warren begins his book, The Purpose-Driven Life, with the words, “It’s not about you.”

“We want to raise Ethan in a culture where serving God and others is part of the DNA.”

We all come into the world, it seems, thinking everything revolves around us. And it first, maybe it does. In fact, for the first 8+ weeks of our time with Ethan, we will both be on parental leave. During this time, we will very much be focused on Ethan! And we can hardly wait!

But as Ethan grows, we want his world to expand beyond himself. It’s an unhealthy attitude for any of us to have that believes, “it’s all about me.”

To help instill a servant culture in our home, we will need to find ways, as a family, to serve — God, each other, others in our church family, and others in the world.

A servant’s heart is a surrendered heart. Jesus demonstrated total surrender like no one else. Perhaps it was because Jesus was reared in a home with a servant culture. He had a mother and father who showed him what surrendered lives look like. As a young (betrothed) wife, Mary was approached by an angel with a mind-boggling opportunity to raise God’s Son. (See Luke 1.26-38.)

Mary, more than a little confused, tried to figure out what it meant. In end, she demonstrated total surrender, saying …

I am the Lord’s servant! Let it happen as you have said.

Now, that’s the kind of attitude we want to help Ethan develop! Of course, that means *we* will need to model that kind of surrender. IOW, shaping a servant culture, a culture where serving God/others is part of the DNA, comes with a pretty big price tag!

This is the fifth part in a series of reflections on the kind of culture we want to create in our home, especially for Ethan. Previously, we’ve written about shaping a Leadership Culture, a God-centered culture, a learning culture, and a high AQ culture. I have a couple other ideas on my list. I’ll try to write about those in the next few days as we prepare to bring Ethan home.

A few weeks ago, someone asked me if we were able to sleep due to thinking about our upcoming adoption. I said we weren’t having any trouble sleeping.

Thankfully, we’ve not really had too much of a problem sleeping. Even when I was going through the worst of the merger process with Alexandria, Barree, and Petersburg, I don’t really recall losing too much, if any, sleep (unless I just don’t remember it).

However, since we got the call on Tuesday, I have had trouble sleeping at night. I’m not thinking about anything in particular (although last night I was thinking about writing a post called, “Sleepless in Pennsylvania” — so hopefully some good will come out of my time awake!), I think I’m just wired.

Or maybe I’m getting used to Korean time, which is 14 hours ahead of us by being awake when it’s nighttime here!

Anyway, as I wrote in my last post, we are preparing to go to Korea. In fact, we’re hoping to finalize travel arrangements today. We’ll post our plans when they’re set!