On service: Ireland, Indiana, Mali
By Jacob Liechty ’02

My brother Aaron asked me if I would speak about service at Campus Worship Night, and I said yes, but asked, “Why me?” I may, in fact, be the least qualified person on campus to speak about service.
Most of the Mennonites here have been raised in a culture of service – a culture where you eat doughnuts as a child at the Relief Sale, volunteer with your MYF group as a teenager, shingle roofs for [La Casa’s] “Help-A-House” day as a college student and, after you graduate, go overseas to dig wells or teach with Mennonite Central Committee. But I didn’t grow up with this. I grew up in Dublin, Ireland, where people are mostly suspicious of service. There is no Relief Sale, no MYF, no Help-A-House and no MCC in Dublin. Actually, there are no Mennonites in Dublin – or at least not more than a couple. So sometimes I feel like a stranger who has accidentally stumbled onto a campus crowded with servants.
I think there are at least two different forms of service. The first and most obvious one involves giving from your material resources in order to satisfy someone else’s needs. Much of the work of Mennonite aid agencies falls into this category. When the Heifer Project ships cows to people who need cows or when workers with the Mennonite Disaster Service rebuild a house destroyed by a tornado, they are engaging in a very significant and very necessary form of service. They are doing just what Jesus told them to do in the passage from Matthew – giving food to the hungry and water to the thirsty and clothing to the naked. I admire them for it. I may even go to join them in doing it when I graduate. The danger, however, lies in believing that this is the only form of service that is needed.
There is another form of service also described by Jesus in the passage from Matthew. As well as feeding the hungry and watering the thirsty and clothing the naked, Jesus instructed his listeners to invite strangers into their homes and take care of the sick and visit the prisoners. The stranger and the prisoner and the one who is sick have not only material needs, but emotional needs as well. Whereas you can satisfy the needs of the hungry, the thirsty and the naked with money and labor and time, you can satisfy the needs of the stranger, the prisoner and the one who is sick only by entering into relationship with them. You must make a personal commitment. You must be prepared to sit at the table or at the hospital bed or outside the cell bars and talk to them.
For me, talking to strangers is hard. What if I have nothing in common with them? What if there is a nervous silence? Talking to prisoners is hard. What if they hate me for seeming soft? Talking to the sick is hard. What if they’re lonely and won’t let me leave? All of this is harder for me than shipping cows or rebuilding houses, because it demands that I give not just of my resources, but of myself. I must make myself open and in doing it, make myself open to being hurt badly.
So, one of the forms of service that I most admire is the service of listening. There are several listeners on this campus. Often, you can’t tell who they are – but about halfway through the semester, students who are exhausted and depressed start to turn up outside their doors looking needy. The listeners take these students in, and sit them down and tend to their souls. They do this simply by listening and offering genuine sympathy, sometimes for hours. When the students leave they are no longer depressed, but feel free. The listeners, on the other hand, sink back into their chairs, exhausted.
Listening, then, is one of the most demanding services that you can perform, because the people to whom you are listening are suffering deeply. They must take and take and take in order to heal, and they may not be able to offer anything in return. I imagine Jesus as a listener. I imagine him looking sad because he had shared in so much sadness.
This summer past I went on Study-Service Term to Mali. For the service portion I was sent to San, a town of 40,000 in the rural southeast of the country. I arrived with 10 other SSTers, all of us believing that we would spend our time helping at hospitals, or planting crops or teaching at schools. Instead, we spent our time putting stamps on envelopes – for hours and hours and hours. It wasn’t the most glorious work, but I suppose it was the work for which we were most useful. And I was glad to do it, because I was incompetent at most everything else and it seemed the most practical way to help.
In spite of this, I suspect that the greatest service that I did in Mali was not for the Malians, but for other members of my SST group. SST was hard for us, sometimes almost impossibly hard. People contracted diseases, and became exhausted and homesick, and it seemed likely that someone would go crazy or just fall apart. We needed each other – badly. Sometimes, in the evenings, I would draw a circle with our names, because that’s how I wanted the group to be: a circle, with no one spinning off the side or falling out the bottom. My service was to talk to those who felt left out, and to draw cards for those who felt unhappy, and sometimes just to fan with my turban those who were suffocating in the heat.
This people-work is the second form of service. It may involve giving money and time and labor, but more than that, it involves giving company and affection and sympathy. It always takes place within a relationship. If I wasn’t speaking on service, I think that I would call it love.

Junior Jacob Liechty of Dublin, Ireland, shared this perspective during Campus Worship Night, Oct. 24, 2000. An English major, he is a President's Leadership Award scholar and a member of the men’s soccer team.

Return to December Bulletin contents
The journey of the magi, and travel journaling, editorial by Rachel Lapp
Lifelong learning: the long approach home by President Shirley H. Showalter
A small boat on a big sea by Mary Lois Detweiler Miller ’50
Lessons from Africa by Sally Jo Milne ’67 with Rachel Lapp
Pole position: uncluttering down under by Greg Lehman ’93
Dear Diary: GC senior reflects on Dominican donation by Alicia Montoya ’01

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