Sharing

Elizabeth Tijerina
Youth Worship Sunday
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

February 8, 2009

We often underestimate the significance of simplicity when it comes to sharing. Our gifts don’t always have to be tangible and they don’t always have to be big. The gifts that we share through God are not judged by anyone and they are accepted unconditionally with gratitude and love. God wants us to share them and he presents us with innumerable opportunities to do so. In today’s scripture, we see the apostle Phillip on a journey.  He is “on-his-way” somewhere specific and on THAT specific road, he sees a chariot with someone in need – an Ethiopian eunuch is “practicing religion” but does not yet know the light of true faith.  It is our job to be like Phillip and step into the chariot, it is our job to take advantage of the doors that God opens for us, and to share the faith we are so blessed to have. We don’t have to be experts to share the light of God’s love with a stranger. What we share does not have to be complex and it does not have to be strategically planned.   I learned this in a clear simple lesson while I was on a journey, specifically a mission trip to Honduras in January of 2008.

During that trip I learned through my experience about one gift that encompasses sharing the comfort of faith with the grace that shines in a smile. It’s something that we can all share and it’s one of the few things that is not hindered by the barriers of language. I learned just how beautifully effective this gift could be when one nervous twelve-year-old girl told me a secret about how God’s love works.

This one young girl, like many of the people of that amazing valley were unimaginably grateful for our team to share with them. We shared songs and we shared crayons; we shared what we produced with our hands and we shared lots and lots of smiles. And for me these smiles were like little packages of grace – little custom-wrapped gifts – that were given and received consistently throughout the week. This gift is not monetary and it is not physical. It was not ceremonious and it never seemed all that significant. But every time I shared a smile with someone I met, I felt like it wasn’t just a smile. Each and every smile was a personal package of grace.  It was one way for me to share my faith.  I guess you could accuse me of re-gifting.  But this display of the love of God is one thing that we should never stop re-gifting.

One of our visits during the week was to a small church in a village deep in the valley and full of grateful and happy smiling faces. We told the story of Noah’s Ark, distributed supplies so each child could make a puppet our of a brown-paper bag, and joyfully observed as the beautiful simplicity of coloring animals together brought a smile to every face in the room. As I was walking around, I approached a young teenage girl dressed in her very finest for the American’s visit. Her skirt was tattered and what she wore was nothing spectacular, it would have gone completely unnoticed had she been here in America. But I could tell, because of the quiet timid pride on her face, that these were the nicest clothes that she owned. She had worn her very best to show to us how much this visit meant to her. I smiled at her and told her how pretty she looked. Immediately she lit up. The effortless compliment that I provided her with this particular smile, lit her up like a jumbo-tron in Memorial Stadium.  It was one little – but complete – circuit of grace. She came with a need to be accepted.  She needed to know that her best dress was good enough.  She needed approval All I had to do was tell her that she looked pretty. The magnitude of her appreciation for this simple compliment brought the light of a smile between us and just as quickly as her face lit up, mine did to. That is why a mission trip like Honduras is so indescribable. I had made her happy, yet I felt like I had done nothing. I was able to share something with this beautiful young lady that ended up returning happiness right back to me. It was simple, yet unforgettable. And I was able to share that grace with her, ONLY because I have been shown grace my entire life by growing up in this congregation.

The love that I have been surrounded with my entire life by my church family has introduced me to grace. It is because of this gift, which I have received, that I feel the need to spread it share it everywhere that I can. The cycle of sharing is plentiful and never-ending. God presents us with opportunities to give, and he rewards us when we least expect it. The giver, the receiver, and the gift being shared are all blessed by the love of God when we exchange it in grace. The more we share the more we receive of the beautiful gift of grace, because when we give it and we live it, we get it back and then we share it again.

The Ethiopian man needed someone to share with him. He could read the scripture and he had a foundation of religion to guide him through understanding, but what he lacked was the faith necessary to carry out God’s work. He has been handed the map, but doesn’t have the light by which he can read it. Phillip brought him the light that he needed. The light is wonderfully unique to each of us, but it spreads between and among people because we want to share it. The light is beautiful and the light is what brings us peace. The light is like the awesomeness of watching the sun rise through the misty fog over the Honduran mountaintops, it’s indescribable. The light is like trying to explain to someone the high you feel right when the church van pulls into Tarrytown to bring you back to the real world after a mission trip, it’s a mystery. The light is like passing the flame from candle to candle on Christmas Eve and watching the faces of our congregation light up together as we sing about the birth of “love’s true light”, it is beautiful. The light is witnessing a change in someone else’s life that you were able to catalyze by sharing love, it is gratifying. The light comes from sharing because that light – shared in that way –  is love in motion. It is God’s amazing grace. 
Due to the constant vicissitudes of life, at some point we will be the Ethiopian man, fumbling in the darkness with the map of religion but in need of the illumination of faith to guide our way through the journey. At other times we will be like Phillip, and we will become the source of light for someone else. Some times we will come to a Christian friend and quietly timidly ask, “Am I good enough?”  At other times, some one may come to you and ask you for grace and approval that God has hidden in your smile.  Fortunately, God has it all planned out very nicely for us so our only requirement is to live and give in the strength of our faith. So now we must join together in love, we must trust each other with faith, and we must share together and continually re-gift God’s amazing grace.