It’s Never Too Late to Make a Difference

Margaret Jarrett is 68-year-old, retired, in relatively good health, with a comfortable place to live. She could be at church every time the doors open, at all the potluck dinners, and taking senior adult ministry trips to Branson , Mo. Instead, she is at home changing diapers, running to and from the doctor, getting up all hours of the night to care for a little one. Or two. Or three.

No, her kids haven't abandoned their kids to her. Margaret Jarrett is doing this on purpose. In fact, it is her purpose.

“I've always loved babies,” Jarrett said as she rocked foster child No. 52. That's right, 52. “At this time in my life it gives me a reason – a very special reason – to get up in the morning. My life is full. The Lord just filled my life with love.”

Ms. Jarrett has nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. She wasn't looking for something to do when she retired about six years ago, but she recognized a void in her life and a love for children in her heart, and the need and opportunity met.

“After I quit work, God put this together in a complete package,” she said of her ministry, which consists of caring for children that are usually just a few days old when she gets them and several weeks-to-months old when she turns them over to adoptive parents. She frequently keeps two children and has had as many as three. “I didn't have anything to do with it. God put it together. All my life I had to work, work, work, and when I quit, He knew I couldn't survive without a purpose, and He had a need I could fit.”

He has a need you can fit, too. Needs abound that will require much work. Sure, Ms. Jarrett could have had a physically easier life by not taking in kids – or so many of them. And she also endures painful emotional separation every time she gives up another baby. “But this is the greatest healing power on earth,” she said as she looked tenderly into the eyes of a baby. “It puts you completely at peace when you look at their faces. That's why I keep doing it. I tell myself all the time that the joy I have with these babies outweighs the pain. God gives me strength, keeps me going. These babies fill my arms and my heart.”

Many of us are guarding our heart and closing our eyes to needs all around us. Oh, we don't mind doing the simple stuff, loving the lovely, encouraging the encouragers. But actions like Ms. Jarrett's beg us to pose a question to the man in the mirror:

Is your love blind?

Are you looking for what is simple, easy, even fun and attractive, and missing all or part of God's purpose in you? If so, you are almost surely ministering in your own strength – ministering as Jesus did requires a vibrant, Spirit-filled, relationship with our heavenly Father. It's easier to live apart from and above the down-and-out, but it's more life-changing – hence, more Christ-like – to move among them.

The homeless. The abandoned. The mentally or emotionally troubled. Let's face it, ministering to them, is inconvenient. Uncomfortable. Sometimes downright nasty. It's beyond us – which is precisely the point. Ministry in the name of Jesus and according to His purposes can only be accomplished in His power. Charles Roesel pastors First Baptist Church of Leesburg, Fla., which has a rescue mission, women's shelter, two children's homes, a pregnancy care center, clothes closet, food pantry, medical center staffed with 20 volunteer doctors and many other ministries that meet countless needs. Roesel says most Christians today organize themselves in “circles of love that include, but also exclude.

“It's nice we include so many, but tragic that we exclude so many. We perceive that there are respectable sins and unrespectable sins, but all sinners were included in the love of Jesus. ”

Roesel suggests that many preachers aren't preaching the whole counsel of God. There is a surface Christianity that doesn't touch deeper needs, and it permeates the church today.

“It's one thing to say we include people, to say that we have compassion, to pray for them, but James makes it very clear it's not enough to pray for someone to be fed,” says Roesel.

We must feed them. And don't stop there. To stop there is to live the ‘social gospel' that only makes the world a better place to go to hell from. “We have not met the deepest need of a person just because we've met their physical or emotional need,” Roesel says. “We must bring them to a saving knowledge of Jesus. Clothes will eventually wear out, but if we bring the person to Jesus, they'll be clothed in clothes of righteousness and will eat of the bread of life for eternity.”

So what does it take to change our outlook and that of those around us? Roesel says change won't come via a guilt trip.

“We start at the wrong place,” says Roesel, who is co-author with Don Atkinson of Meeting Needs, Sharing Christ , a book about ministry evangelism. “We try to motivate people, and we're incapable. But if we help them move into a more vital relationship with Him, He will take care of the problem.”

Jesus is known for giving sight to the blind. He can cure your love blindness, too.

“I've found the more I practice the presence of Jesus – in quiet time, in walking with Him, talking with Him, in looking at Him through His work – the less I exclude people from His circle of love.

“When we are in vital relationship with Jesus Christ, He motivates us, gives us passion.”

He gives us the same interests in others that He has. Oswald Chambers taught, “ When the Spirit of God has shed abroad the love of God in our hearts, we begin deliberately to identify ourselves with Jesus Christ's interests in other people, and Jesus Christ is interested in every kind of man there is … Many of us are after our own ends, and Jesus Christ cannot help Himself to our lives. If we are abandoned to Jesus, we have no ends of our own to serve. Paul said he knew how to be a “door-mat” without resenting it, because the mainspring of his life was devotion to Jesus.”

If you want to minister as Jesus did, Roesel says follow His example: “He would meet their physical need and then go to their spiritual need. That's a spiritual principle that runs from the Old Testament prophets through the New Testament.”

Studying Jesus' way of ministering and identifying with it by identifying with Him is crucial to spiritual health, says Roesel, who points out that there will be a final exam.

“When I was in seminary, I wanted to know what was going to be on the final,” Roesel says. “If the Lord says, ‘This is what matters,' everyone should pay attention. Well, he said what matters. He said that when you feed the hungry or cloth the naked, you do the same to Him, and that when you don't, you don't do it to Him (Matthew 25:35-46). If man had been writing the parable, we'd write it according to what we didn't do. But by that standard our long-haired Mexican Chihuahua is a fine Christian, because he doesn't dance, chew or run around with wild dogs.”

Margaret Jarrett could have sat at home the rest of her life, not doing anything bad, and she would not have been in right relationship with her Father. But she chose to do as Christ led her to do.

“People can be so useful, they can make such a difference,” she said. “That message needs to get to everybody in the country, that God can use them. The clock is ticking. These little babies – and lots of other people – are so needy. Time is short and God can use everyone.”

Sidebar 1

Construction of a theology of service to others does not require digging in remote, seldom-quoted portions of Scripture. The Great Commandment, the Great Commission, the purpose statements of Jesus, and the ‘Sheep and Goat' judgment combine to leave us with no question what we are called to do – the only question is obedience.

Consider:

The Great Commandment -- Matthew 22:37-40

“ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

The Great Commission – Matthew 28:18-20; Mark 16:15; Luke 24:48; John 20:21; Acts 1:8

Of the five distinct Great Commission passages, perhaps the least quoted is John 20;21, yet it suggested the greatest identification with the exact work and actions of Christ: “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.”

The Purpose of Jesus – Found in His words in about 35 verses in the New Testament, and including:

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” – Mark 2:17

“And whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave – just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” -- Matthew 20:27-28

The ‘Sheep and Goat' Judgment -- Matthew 25:31-46

(selected lines) “for I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in . . . . Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? . . . And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to me. . . . Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.' And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Sidebar 2

Margaret Jarrett's love isn't blind – but it is colorblind.

A visit to her home doesn't last long before she ushers you into a bedroom in which the walls are lined with 8-by-10 photos of all but a handful (the first few) of the 52 babies she has kept (as of mid-August, 2001). Immediately striking is the mix of children: black may outnumber white, not an insignificant fact in a rural area of the South where most folks don't even pretend that racism has been overcome.

Jarrett has no political explanation for her acceptance of whatever child God sends her – she just figures that is what Jesus would do.

“ If every family would take a baby of the opposite race, that would put a complete end to race problems,” she says. “When I look in that face I don't see any color, I just see that precious new-born baby.”

This article originally appeared in Home Life Magazine