One of the duties that the Lord tasks us with is to serve our fellow man. Like any duty He gives us, we quickly find that it is solely designed to improve us and make us more like Him. We should understand that duty and do our best to fulfill it.
One thing that I've noted about service is that when the Savior asks us to serve our fellow man, he's not telling us to come up with a theoretically perfect service project. Often, He isn't going to give us perfect conditions, perfect weather, perfect timing, or serendipitous circumstances. Sometimes His loving-kindnesses make these things possible, and greatly reduce our burdens, but in the end our duties are still required of us, not as an academic exercise but in our practical reality.
We need to have charity, not in a vacuum or in a snow globe but in the lone and dreary world in which we now live. We need to forgive, not as an mental exercise but here and now, even if we’ve been hurt and are still hurting. We need to give other people our love and our time, even if it’s inconvenient and we think we have better things to do.
In the end, we're not serving God except when we serve our fellow man. And when we serve our fellow man, we're bound to bump up against delays, imperfections, character flaws, and sins. We're going to get impatient, bored, confused, frustrated, and even angry.
The end result, however, is worth it. We live in the world as it is, so we're going to bump into the delays and imperfections anyway. True service can truly mitigate the frustrations of mortality, blessing both them serving and them being served by shining a light into the divine potential in each of us. By highlighting what is good and great in each of us, service turns us toward God and makes us better than if we were turned around gnawing on our little morsels. It gives us a feast of godliness and holiness to consume, and makes us part of something greater than ourselves.
So in the end, when we devote our lives to serving God and our fellow man, we are not simply turned into ourselves, with our own base lusts and our own petty hurts; instead, we are sons and daughters of the Most High, animated with the greatest principles and blessed with the highest ordinances an almighty God has to offer. Let us serve!
I have come to realize that serving others is not always taking dinner or cookies to someone or even going to the temple although these are both good ways to serve. Sometimes serving others means you attend extra meetings or events where others have worked hard to make said event successful. Those in charge need to feel they are serving others by planning and carrying out events that can bring us closer to Christ and to one another.
ReplyDelete