ONE.

Sometimes I find it amazing how something that seems so small to me can greatly affect someone’s future. Something that I do on a regular basis, something I don’t think twice about – something such as making a phone call. We do it pretty much every day – making calls. It’s just a part of our culture, our generation. What’s a cell phone for anyways? To me, serving has become like that as well. I don’t want it to become mundane and familiar, but I do want it to be a part of who I am, not just a part of my life here at college and church. Well, when you combine the two (phone calls and serving), you get one thing: making calls to members of the church. Don’t worry, I’m not going off on one of my tangents. Let me explain a bit more what this has to do with anything.

For Sisterhood (the women’s ministry service on Thursday mornings), I serve in the buses ministry. When I am rostered on for the week, I ride on one of the church buses that picks women up around Sydney who don’t have cars. I get to greet the women and just make them feel welcome in the mornings. The lady who oversees this area is actually about to have a baby, so I told her I don’t mind helping to make the phone calls and such like she used to do. So this week I made the phone calls and edited the bus run sheet, which just tells the bus driver the routes we need to take for that Thursday morning. I was given a few new people to contact along with the “regulars”. One lady, though, had an incomplete number. I actually was thinking it looked weird, because it was only 7 digits, and it looked like an American number, like this: (xxx-xxxx). Home numbers here are 8 digits, so I realized a number was missing. I emailed the bus driver that morning, and kept checking my email, but no reply. So finally that evening she sent me an email back with the correct number. I called this lady and said, “Hi, this is Rian from Hillsong Church and I’m calling about Sisterhood tomorrow. Just wondering if you are coming and if you need a ride on the bus?” She seemed really happy to talk to me and was saying that she wanted to come to Sisterhood but didn’t have a car. I told her that I didn’t have a car and that I know how frustrating that can be, and I told her that the Sisterhood bus could pick her up. When she got what I was saying, she was SO incredibly happy! I apologized for not calling earlier but someone had given me an incomplete number and I just got the right number. She was so thankful that I actually “went to so much trouble” (as she put it) to get her number. It really didn’t seem like a big deal to me. “It’s just my job.”

When I met her on the bus the next morning, God just totally spoke through me. I didn’t say much to her on the ride because I wasn’t sitting next to her, but as we were getting off I asked her if she had anyone to sit with and she said, “No.” I told her I didn’t either and asked if she wanted to sit with me. She refused at first because she thought I wanted to sit with my friends or something, but I reassured her that I had no one to sit with and I wanted to sit with her.

The reason I say “God just totally spoke through me” is because after the service was over and I was chatting with her, she told me that she wanted to go to Colour Conference this past year (yes, what I’ve been talking about in my past couple blogs) but that she couldn’t afford it. She said that she applied for financial aid but no one at the church contacted her. I apologized to her and encouraged her to still come next year. She then told me what totally hit me hard. She told me that because no one had contacted her (and she had tried several times to call the church but no one was helpful) about Colour, she was becoming really bitter. She told me that if I hadn’t called her, she would’ve been turned off from the church. I quickly realized after that how crucial it was to be connected. I learned that she has been going to Hillsong now for 8 years, and yet she still doesn’t know hardly anyone! That blows my mind, because I’ve been going to Hillsong a little over 8 months, and I know so many people. But you know what? It’s not about knowing people and having friends and people seeing you, it’s about quietly finding that “one”. It’s about loving the “one.” Because I know if I were the last person on earth, Jesus still would’ve died for me. He’s all about the “one”. He’s all about you.