award

Last Saturday was our Epworth community’s Annual Cottagers Meeting.  As things got started, I had the shock of my life:  Mallory Carr, the President of the Board of Trustees announced that I had been selected as Epworth’s Good Citizen for 2022.  I couldn’t have been more surprised.  Over the years I’ve done a lot of volunteering on the resort and been very visible.  In 2013 for my culminating offering on the Program Committee of the Epworth Church, I packed the Auditorium with a paying audience to see a Motown group.  Before they arrived, I had cleaned out the whole backstage area of years of stored financial records, sheet music, leftover props from previous Variety Shows—I contacted every organization to come and take what they wanted, and I paid for the installation of new mirrors in the dressing rooms.  It was a job that took me all summer, and it didn’t garner this kind of commendation.

So, this year even as the chair of the Historical Society, I had been laid up for a week with Covid and then a few more days hampered with a sprained ankle, and I felt like I was off the radar.  I went to the annual meeting praying that I would stay that way—that I would listen to others’ opinions and not speak.  I was also praying that God would bring good fruit in my life, that I would be a channel of God’s peace and that the consistency of my loving service would speak louder than any words of “wisdom” that I might be tempted to offer.

And then this happened.  This totally unexpected affirmation of all my contributions big and small.  And do you know what pleased me the most?  In the introduction of my award, Mallory mentioned that I gather people for daily scripture reading.  It’s a practice I began in 2000.  Many who have attended over the years have passed on.  Sometimes our remnant gathering at noon is only two or three.  Occasionally one of us sits in front of the church alone.  It is easy to feel that this meeting is invisible and insignificant.  But it is noticed, and it is appreciated. 

When my husband and I were doing youth ministry many years ago, I used to tell other leaders to remember that what we do “is all cumulative,” meaning that no one event will be that moment that changes a young person or the world.  We are to be doing the small, good and right things over and over, every day, for year after year.  And then one day, maybe after we’re gone, but one day someone will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”  Saturday was my day. 

To God be the glory! 

Love, Liz