Super Hero; Super Friend
John Fischer

My new friend, the carpenter/handyman, stopped by again yesterday. He brought me a couple lemon cucumbers from his wife’s garden and his own contribution to my makeshift tool collection, a brand new carpenter’s square with a 45-degree angle and a built in level.

This guy is starting to take on legendary proportions in my mind. He might even start to challenge the “Super Palmer” of my past. For that story we have to go back some 30 or more years when I was in college and brought one of my roommates home for Spring break. My father was having some work done on our house assisted by a handyman from our church whose name was Palmer.

Now Palmer enjoyed legendary status around our house. There was seemingly no carpentry problem he couldn’t solve. He wasn’t there every day, but when my father ran into trouble, it was time to call in the big gun. Calling “Super Palmer” to the rescue had become a family joke.

One morning while my roommate and I were having breakfast, Palmer was doing some work on a ladder just outside the breakfast room window. We were just making some comments about our new super hero, when suddenly his boots lifted off the ladder and he was gone. Now, of course, he was just jumping on the roof, but there was no mistaking it for my roommate and me. It was clearly Super Palmer off to save his next amateur handyman in distress. “It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…” well, you know how it goes.

So much in me says there must be a “sell” coming sometime soon with this new super hero who is helping me on my current remodeling project, but it doesn’t, and my doubts are whittling away. I’m sad and somewhat embarrassed at how suspicious I have become, and how hard it is to trust the innocent agenda of a helping, serving person.

Realizing this helps me understand how one’s purpose-driven mission to share Christ with others needs to be balanced by a spirit of genuine service, whether we ever talk about Christ or not. True service asks for nothing in return. If sharing Christ ever becomes the “sell” of our service, it will rob our words of their integrity.

No one wants to be someone’s project; everyone wants to be someone’s friend. With the Holy Spirit alive and well in you and me, and with the knowledge that God draws people to himself, even in spite of us sometimes, that leaves the mutual respect of a real relationship able to stand as an end in itself. In other words, you can serve without an agenda, and take it from me on the other side of the equation; it’s wonderful to be treated this way.

PDL