Dino Rizzo author of Servolution and pastor of Healing Place Church in Louisiana is on TOUR! Well a blog tour at least. Here is the question I asked Dino about his church and serving in the community.
Dino have you ever embarrassed yourself while serving in the community?
Thanks, Guy, for participating in the tour. And thanks for asking such an important question. Really. I think there’s a great point to be made here. Have I ever been embarrassed in an outreach? Yes indeed. There have been more times than I want to remember. Like the time we got a shipment in of 40,000 plantains (a member of the banana family that is really more like a potato and certainly isn’t edible raw). I thought they were bananas. They looked like bananas, and everyone we gave them to believed us when we told them they were bananas. But what a surprise when people started peeling them back and trying to eat them.
There were the thousands of coffee cakes we gave away only to learn they had expiration dates several weeks past. There was the time we accepted a truckload of yogurt to distribute but didn’t think about how we were going to keep all the yogurt cold. We didn’t have any refrigeration to handle a truckload of yogurt.
There are times when I’ve been embarrassed because we didn’t think of something we should have. But there are also times I’ve been embarrassed just because the outreach itself was embarrassing. Like the time I tell about in the book where we received a truckload of goods to give away, which included a huge box of leopard-print plus-sized lingerie. There were certainly our fair share of embarrassing moments as our team gave the lingerie away.
And there’s just some moments that are a little awkward. Like a few weeks ago, I went with our team on a late-nite bar outreach. We just set up outside the bars around closing time and offer people water and juice and Chick-Fil-A sandwiches. I gave a sandwich to a dude who was shocked to see me there – he said he goes to our church and really couldn’t believe I was down there checking on him.
The important point in all this is that in serving, when you’re extending yourself to try to do all you can to serve your community, you’re going to make mistakes sometimes. And sometimes it is going to require being willing to put yourself in an awkward spot in order to be where you need to be to serve.
Thanks Dino for letting me participate in the tour.
