Service is a topic close to my heart. It’s a way to express gratitude to organizations and individuals we love. On Sunday, August 28, 2025 I had the opportunity to share at First Presbyterian how service springs from a heart of gratitude and how important it is to serve alongside and for one another in a community. Here’s a snippet:

It’s nearly impossible for me to talk about any aspect of life without mentioning my children. So I’m just gonna jump in from the beginning. Prior to having kids John and I volunteered. Now I can’t speak for John but my motivation for volunteering centered around wanting to fill my time, looking for friends, and doing good just because good needed to be done. I volunteered where needed with no real direction.

Then I had kids. Suddenly, volunteering took on a life of it’s own. See a need, fill a need, or the kids weren’t going to get to do that one thing they desperately wanted to do and it would be all my fault, whether it was the church play, a team sport, scouting, cookie sales, field trips, homeschool co-ops, mops groups, Sunday schools and children’s church… it would be a balance between spending time with the kids and a nice healthy dose of obligation and guilt that keeps me volunteering. Except in one area.

St Jude Children’s Hospital. When they ask, or even slightly suggest, we jump. If they ask us to go speak to donors to share our daughter’s story we say yes 100% of the time, when they asked Katie to do a radiothon or to do a photoshoot we never hesitated, when they ask us to participate in research studies the answer is always yes. Why? How could we say no? It doesn’t come from a sense of obligation. At no time has the hospital said to us we did this for you, we expect loyalty and servitude. Instead, what they did was give us the greatest gift of all, our daughters life and health. They never asked for anything, not a dime. Instead, they presented us with opportunities to show our gratitude though they never required it of us. Our willingness to do whatever we can for St Jude comes from a deep seated root of gratefulness. We can never, no matter what we do for them, pay back the gift they gave us. We crave opportunities to serve them. How could we not?

But this sermon isn’t about St. Jude Children’s Hospital.

You can read the full sermon here: A Commitment to Serve.

For more on volunteering/service I’ve collected a few articles:

• You and me? Let’s date
• Is it possible to find passion?
• Service: When My Heart Isn’t In It