Jeremy:
Is to serve as a family. I know that for a lot of us, we’re in crisis mode. But sometimes a way to deal with that, Isn’t to wait until everything is great, but to actually to carve out a little bit of time during your week to serve. And so it’s really important to think about, is there some way that you can uniquely serve. On Instagram, we published nine creative ways to serve. I want to talk about three of those.

And then Jeff shot out a really awesome email that really describes some of the ways he’s thinking about this season in terms of service. But three of the ways… We’re starting online Bible study, maybe for your neighborhood or a friend group. I’ve been on a couple of those. We’ve used Google Hangouts, it literally took me about five seconds to create a link to [crosstalk 00:00:41] shoot it out to the group and they’re there. Some of you guys have-

Jeff:
Well didn’t you guys do it last night for a youth group?

Jeremy:
What’s that?

Jeff:
Didn’t you do it last night for a youth group?

Jeremy:
We did, yeah. So we have a whole group of high school students that come to our house every Thursday night. And so what we did instead was I just shot out this Google Hangout link and they were all on there, and we spent about two hours going deep into the word. It was so amazing to watch it all the siblings sitting together in their different quarantined rooms.

We had two kids in our house that were sick, Lisa and Sidney, they logged on. And soeven while they were sick, they were able to completely participate in this group and get out of cabin fever. And so I just think everyone should probably be a part of this. I’m going to be part about three or four of these actually every week, but you can start those. Another is to start a neighborhood Facebook group or some way to communicate with the people that are closer to you.

We’ve started one about five years ago here on our street. And so that lights up at times like this and people can share needs, or we can be constantly prompting them with questions, how are you guys doing? Do you guys need anything? And then a third way that’s really been cool in our area is find ways to promote local businesses and help them. So if you hear a lot of us, like for example, we have a sewing studio. And we’ve come up with four or five creative ways for people to buy fabric and things like that during the quarantine, during the shutdown, and every other business that I can see in Fort Thomas, they have listed those ways.

And so all over social media people are posting, “Hey, this is how you support this business, how you support this small business.’ And so I think doing some of that is really, really helpful during this time. But yeah, Jeff, how are you thinking about this love that verse you shared from Romans.

Jeff:
Yeah. From Romans 12. And real quick, two more things on the business thing that I saw just on Twitter this morning, really helpful practical tips of just, hey, if you want to support some artists and creatives, one easy way to do that is pay for future services, right? So if you need… If you’re in a good spot and you know you need photos a year from now, then pay a photographer right now and say, “Hey, I need photos in 12 months” or same thing with restaurants in regards to gift cards, right?

Buying any type of gift card right now is giving them the money now, trusting they can offer you the service later. So similar as well… I think is another helpful way. But yeah, so Romans 12. And I was just meditating on it a couple days ago, and it just felt so pertinent and potent for this season.

And I love those verses where you can almost chew on each little cadence, and this one has 12 of them. Let love be genuine, abhor what is evil. Hold fast to what is good. And it goes on and on. And I’m like, man, each one of those, I almost feel like I want to give it a day’s worth of attention and meditation. And that’s how our family’s trying to think through these things, is how can we, each one of these, how can we maybe spend a day or two thinking on that? What would it look like for our family to let love be genuine together, but also to the outside world? How can we hold fast to what is good? What are things that the world’s losing right now in crisis that the Lord says, no, I still want you to do that even in a squeezed time,

Outdoing one another in showing honor. What will it look like to just go to your neighbor or write them a card or something, that just honors them. Who they are, how they serve, how you appreciate them. Be constant in prayer. Same thing. What would it look like to just shoot off five texts every morning, of just like, Hey, I’m praying for you. I’m praying for you. I’m praying for you. And here’s why. I think it’s also helpful to be a little specific of just like, Hey, I was thinking about you this morning, I’m praying this verse over you. I just wanted to let you know this is a truth. And so I think, yeah, letting scripture saturate this moment. What I think we forget is the new Testament was written in crisis.

You know what I mean? Or at least like a more familiar world of us now to them, than like our normal world to them. You know what I mean? Just like there’s famine. There is diseases in the first century world. There is back and forth and shipwrecks, and persecution. The new Testament is actually… A lot of these things that don’t seem pertinent to us is because we aren’t in the context of where they were written. And now we are, at some level, in a different way. They come alive more, and I think that’s really, really helpful.

Jeremy:
Yeah. I love to, when you were saying texting people. One of the… I was listening to a couple of years ago. Jamie Fox did an interview with Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss is obsessed with people’s morning routines. So Jamie Fox is going through his morning routine and he said, “Then I get up and I just text three or four people, tell him I’m thinking about them. [crosstalk 00:04:56] Yeah. So I just started doing this during my prayer time. You think about in the morning when you’re praying-

Jeff:
That ends up being thousands over the year.

Jeremy:
Yeah. You just… Why not? You can immediately pray with… Especially now. Why would you spend your entire prayer time all alone, when right there on your phone you can be communicating. I’m like, “Ooh, I’m praying for you right now, anything I can ask the Lord for you?” “Oh, I thought about this, I’m praying for this.” Even if you spend five minutes in prayer, you probably text three or four people during that time and have even better prayer time, but also encourage three or four people and maybe get some prayer requests back from those people. So yeah, just being created to connect with people right now.