Keys to the kingdom

Did you know the word janitor comes from Janus, the Roman god of gates and doorways? So does the word January, since Janus was also the god of beginnings.

When I think of a janitor, I have a mental picture of a guy with a mop in his hand and a big ring of keys hanging from his belt. Janitors take their name from Janus because of all those keys.

In our society, we tend to think of the position of janitor as a low, dead-end kind of job. I'm not so sure.

Last week I was handed a bunch of keys with strange codes stamped on them along with a chart to tell me what each key locks and unlocks. I promptly misplaced my cheat sheet, meaning I was left with a big handful of keys that unlocked . . . something. Thus began my official duties as a deacon in our church.

In our Presbyterian church, the deacons show up early to unlock the building and stay late to lock it back up. Between those two times they perform other chores and move a lot of furniture from here to there and back to here again.

The word deacon derives from the Greek word diakonos, which means servant. It's the right word for this office.

I was in college the last time I had a key to something I didn't live in or drive.

In high school I worked for a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop on Buford Highway in Atlanta. After I'd been working there a while, Mr. Steele, the owner, asked me to take over opening the shop on Sunday mornings, which was his day off.

I grew up a little on the day Mr. Steele gave me my very own key to the store.

There was a long checklist of things to do to get the store ready for business, but I enjoyed getting there early on Sunday and having a quiet hour by myself to prepare the shop for the hungry masses to come.

In college I had the keys to another store, this one was a Tenneco food/gas mart near our suburban Atlanta home. I worked there a few years during weekends and school breaks, and for most of that time I was the guy locking up after midnight or opening up before dawn. That place also had checklists and detailed procedures for opening and closing.

So far, being a deacon strikes me as similar in some ways to those two experiences of long ago.

Deacons do more than opening and closing the church, of course, as I began to discover when I attended my first meeting as a member of the diaconate, but I'll try not to stray too far off topic today by boring you with the minutes of our meeting.

When Teri chaired her department at Loyola University in New Orleans, she had her own fat ring of keys to keep up with. At that time I had just a couple of keys on my keyring and I teased her about the heavy clump of keys she had to carry with her.

The ring of keys to the church are a tangible reminder of my new position as a church officer. Yes, the keys are a symbol of the church's faith in me, just as that key from Mr. Steele was a symbol of his trust. But those keys are also the keys of a janitor, the keys of a servant. I think the real reason they give deacons all of those keys is so that they don't forget that lesson.