No.  Not Save our Souls.  Not Survivors on Shore.  Not Save our Ships.  Summer of Service.  Every year for the last few years, Calvary’s youth team has led the charge to call youth from congregations throughout the city to serve.  It’s a pretty cool summer camp experience.  For more info you can go to Stacy’s blog Stac’s Place for a recap and then click SOS 2009 to watch a cool video.

So why Summer of Service?  If you remember your science history, it was about 500 years ago that Nicholas Copernicus challenged the scientific and religious status quo but suggesting that the earth was not at the center of the universe.  That in fact the earth revolved around the sun.  Do you know how difficult it was for people to accept this paradigm shift — that we were not the center of the unvrse?

His ideas were denounced by the Pope, John Calvin and Martin Luther.  His books banned almost 200 years.  It is ever so difficult for us to walk willingly out of the center of life, isn’t it?  None of us, or at least most of us would never let the words, “life is all about me” come out of our mouths, but secretly we think it’s true.

If we want to be wise James 3:13-18 says that we need to make a Copernicus recalculation that takes me out of the center of the universe.  Think you are wise, prove it by good deeds done with humility.

I agree with Mark Batterson, a pastor in D.C. when he says,

I think one of my primary responsibilities as a parent is to make sure my kids experience a Copernicus revolution.  In other words, at some point, it is my job as a parent to stop caring for their needs and make sure that they start caring for the needs of people around them.  They come to a point in their life that they realize the world does not revolve around them.

In his book The Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster suggests that one of the greatest exercises in the pursuit of humility is service.  That’s why things like Summer of Service have never been optional for my kids.  That’s why we’ll give up Christmas and all sorts of cool vacations and stuff in order to take our family to Myanmar to serve at an orphanage.  Because service is the pathway out of self-centeredness  and into the humility that comes from wisdom.

God’s wisdom isn’t all about getting ahead.  God’s wisdom isn’t about getting insider information that will keep us from all the difficult paths of life.  God’s wisdom is relational.  It’s all about taking my self out of the center, so that I don’t end up alone in the circle.  What does your wisdom look like?