Author:  Taylor, serving on staff with Kaleo Missions in New Orleans. To submit a story or a photo for our Kaleo Missions blog, email blog@kaleomissions.org.

At Kaleo New Orleans we spent time serving at the New Orleans Mission, a ministry providing services for the homeless community. They serve three meals a day, and afterwards volunteers disperse under the bridge with gloves and trash bags to collect the trash carelessly tossed onto the ground. This way, the city won’t become angry with the homeless population and shut down the entire operation. My team was assigned to go out with gloves and garbage bags. There was a lot of trash: wrappers, alcohol bottles, plastic bags, dirty socks. In the midst of the filth, I found something special. Beneath some rubble lay a small sky-blue slip of paper with “John 4:34-38” written on it.

Later we had the opportunity to eat lunch with the homeless men and women. The Mission served up hot and tasty gumbo and gourmet deserts from Whole Foods! My team was puzzled: “They get better food than we do!” That night I looked up the Bible verse that I had found in the rubble when we were cleaning under the bridge and rejoiced in how good the Holy Spirit is to have given me the words to share. John 4:34 says, “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work.” Rather than food, Christ’s duty to show God’s love was His source of satisfaction. For the homeless community (and every one else for that matter), the Gospel is the only bread that can bring eternal satisfaction.

There is a saying here at Vieux Carre Baptist Church that “God was working in New Orleans long before you and I got here, and He’ll continue working long after.” Continuing in the passage in John 4, Jesus says, “Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together.Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true.  I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”

This is why we serve. We follow Christ’s example. He has readied the field for us, and it is our inheritance, to reap this field. This is the food that outlasts any Whole Foods gourmet desert: doing the will of our Daddy God.