There is a broom in the corner of many rooms. Everyone walks past it. Everyone sees the dirty floor. But not everyone reaches for it. That gap between seeing and doing is exactly where Jesus lived, and where most of us fall short. His willingness to serve never waited on the right conditions. He gave when there was no return coming, gave when interrupted, and gave to people who had no business receiving anything from him. That quality is harder to imitate than it looks, and it begins not with action but with what we are willing to let happen to our hearts.
When the Person Does Not Deserve It
In John 13, Jesus knelt in front of twelve men at the end of a long day. They had walked dusty roads shared with animals. Their feet were the last thing anyone in that room wanted to handle. What makes the scene remarkable is not the act itself but who received it. Judas was in that room. Scripture is clear that Jesus already knew what was coming (). The betrayal was not hidden from him. And still he did not skip Judas. He knelt and washed the feet of the man who would hand him over for thirty pieces of silver.
That image deepens when placed alongside : “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the Lord will reward you.” God’s people have always been called to live at a different standard. The world returns kindness only to those who give first. Jesus did something else entirely. On the cross, surrounded by mockery, he asked the Father to forgive the very people responsible (). When a soldier named Malchus lost his ear during the arrest in the garden, Jesus healed him on the spot (). An enemy. A man actively participating in his capture. Healed.
The question worth sitting with is not simply whether we can serve people who are difficult to love. It is what happens inside us when we do. When we push past the impulse that says someone does not deserve this, something is being shaped in us that cannot be formed any other way.
Eyes That See What Needs to Be Done
Some kids walk into a dirty cabin and pick up the broom without being told. Not because they were asked, not because someone will notice, but because they see what the floor needs. That quality does not come naturally to most people. Most of us serve when the conditions are favorable.
Jesus had that kind of vision constantly. When the disciples in the upper room were occupied with arguing about who would be the greatest, Jesus saw twelve pairs of dirty feet and moved toward them. He did not call a meeting or deliver a speech. He picked up the basin and got to work. A servant, he showed them, develops eyes to see what needs to be done and a heart that moves toward it without waiting for permission or applause.
That kind of vision is something that can be cultivated. speaks of transformation through the renewal of the mind. Part of what that renewal looks like in practice is learning to enter a room the way Jesus entered it, noticing what everyone else has walked past, and responding to it.
When It Comes at the Wrong Time
Mark 5 sets two crises side by side in a way that feels almost deliberately uncomfortable. A man named Jairus falls at Jesus’s feet, desperate. His daughter is dying. Jesus agrees to come. They are walking, the crowd pressing in, when a woman reaches through and touches his garment (). She had suffered for twelve years. She was healed instantly. And Jesus stopped.
From a practical standpoint, this looks like the worst possible moment for a delay. A child’s life is in the balance. But Jesus did not treat the woman as an interruption or an obstacle to the more important errand. He gave her his full attention. He called her “daughter.” He stayed until the truth was told and she had received not just healing but peace.
This is the consistent pattern in the Gospels. Jesus repeatedly made room for people who arrived unannounced. There is a prayer that captures the posture well: Father, help me not see people as problems to be managed, but as imagebearers to be loved. Some of the greatest opportunities to serve will arrive without an appointment. The unexpected phone call, the conversation that runs long after church, the friend who needs an hour when five minutes was the plan. The question is whether we are open to those moments, or whether our schedules have begun crowding out our sense of purpose.
The Heart at the Center
All of it points back to one question: what kind of servant am I becoming? Not whether a task was completed but whether the heart was in it. There is a difference between service performed for recognition and service that flows from who a person is actually becoming. Sweeping floors because it is required and sweeping them because you see what needs to be done are not the same act, even if they look identical from the outside.
The transformation Paul describes in , offering the whole self to God and letting the mind be renewed, is not instant. It is daily. It is built in the moments when we choose to serve someone who did not ask, who will not remember, who does not deserve it, or who showed up at exactly the wrong time. Those are the moments that do something to the interior. Those are the moments when, slowly and often without fanfare, we begin to look a little more like Jesus.