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Today's
Meditation:
Somehow
we tend to grow up thinking that service is something that's
done for us, and if we provide any service, we should be
paid for it. I guess we're taught this by people who
have learned the monetary "value" of time, and who
realize the potential gain involved in acts of
service. Many of us also learn to feel a bit of
resentment towards those people who don't serve at all,
while we serve a great deal, for that really isn't fair, is
it? So we serve less, hoping that others will do their
fair share.
But
Browning points our something that could be very important
to us--every act of service that we render is in its depths
an act of service to ourselves. By serving another
person or other people, we ultimately are making ourselves
better, stronger, more compassionate human beings, more able
to love, more able to feel, more able to accept love.
We
don't all need to dedicate our lives to broad service with
little to no financial return as did Mother Teresa. We
all don't need to work full time in homeless shelters or
homes for battered children. Much of our service takes
place on the extremely small levels, in the daily
interactions that we have with other people, in the small
things that we teach and those times when we comfort others
in times of stress and need. We serve with a smile or
a few words of encouragement, and we serve with what we can
afford to give to others who are serving on a grander
scale--but we are not obligated to give more than we can
afford.
How
do we make ourselves glad and rich and strong? It's
quite simple, actually, and we have opportunities for doing
so every single day that we live. We do so by serving,
and our service does double duty by providing the service to
others, and providing a separate service to ourselves.
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