Serving Up Beauty

We talk a lot here at Just the Girls: Real Beauty about having a servant's heart.  A lot of our Beautiful Girls spend  a lot of their time serving others.  But what does that mean, really?  Millions of women serve others every day, what makes these particular women's service beautiful?

  Servant beauty is all in the attitude.  See, we can serve all we want, but the minute we complain about it, or make ourselves out as martyrs because we do so much service, or make the people we are serving feel below us, we've lost the beauty.  This is something I am working on myself!  I caught myself feeling high and mighty because I made myself available to substitute teach the children's Sunday School classes at my church.  Teachers would ask me, and I would complain and roll my eyes and sigh, just to make sure they knew how much I was sacrificing!  What a dummy I was!  At one point, I had gotten so bad that the teachers didn't want to ask me any more.  They'd ask anyone else they could think of, then come to me as a last resort!  If I cooked for a church event, I let everyone know how much time it took and how many times I'd gone to the grocery store and how much money I'd paid for the ingredients.  If I cleaned the church, I made sure to put on my Facebook status how messy everything was and how long it took.   If I took out the trash at home, I'd make sure to remind my son that I'd done his job.  I'd make sure my daughter knew how many miles I'd driven her that week.  I was serving, but not beautifully!

When I look at Kristin, I see a real, beautiful, servant's heart.  Kristin doesn't really think about serving as SERVICE, she just does it because it is who she is.  She doesn't talk about how much she is sacrificing, because she doesn't think of it as giving something up.  She also has a hard time sitting still, so she loves to fill up her day with things to do!  She also doesn't wait to be asked, if she sees the need she just serves.  However, if someone does need to ask for help, they aren't worried that Kristin will roll her eyes and sigh and complain like I might...she won't.  It's more likely that she'll thank them for asking and set about it with that beautiful smile on her face.  She doesn't need thanks, she doesn't need affirmation, she doesn't even need us to know she did it.

  I sometimes still have to make a conscious effort not to sigh an "I guess"  when I'm asked to serve.  I do want to serve, I don't know why I feel like I need to make a federal case out of it!  I'm learning from Kristin, though, how to serve beautifully!  Eye-rolling is never beautiful, so put  beautiful smiles on those beautiful faces and serve, Beautiful Girls!  The more you and I do it, without complaint, the more second-nature it will become!