Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2012 5:29 am +0000
Posts: 6039
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Student wrote: Sometimes it helps to approach "service" from a different angle, like evaluating whether you can live without hurting anyone.
Indeed!! Well said. First...do no harm. To do no harm and to serve others with effect comes with experience and wisdom. But the effort to share our compassion should be constant I think, no matter our situation or location or maturity or results.
A post of mine from another topic on service:
I wonder... is service an act or deed? Or is it the motive for any good deed? Isn't it our intent and purpose and priorities that determine, define, and deliver service - the action expression of love and altruism and caring and compassion?
Like art, isn't the expression of love the actual experience of love too? To soothe a fear or pain or ease a troubled heart is to feed another soul the light of eternity I think... but our own soul too!
Being kind and generous and caring is the way of faith and the family of creation. To love one another and serve others is the way of God's friendly universe. It is good to support organizational and institutional ministries of social service and upliftment to reduce the devastation of hunger and disease and disaster and hate and war and loss of family and home and security and health.
But service is something everyone can and must do in our daily life too, no matter our own situation or circumstances. To be kind and caring with one another is merely to demonstrate our personal Spirit connection. We receive mercy and love to the degree we bestow mercy and love. Service is simply the expression of our personal morality and spiritization and religious experience.
When I say "must do" I do not mean by commandment, but by nature!! To be filled with light is to radiate light. We must because service is the inevitable outcome of our own religious experience and relationship with God. It is the act of faith results. Service is simply a reality expression.
Service begins in the home and family and community and radiates outward endlessly. Who is our neighbor Jesus asked? Who is not? Morality and ethics are human nature by our Deity connections. Loyalty and duty and generosity and compassion and love and the Golden Rule are inevitable motives of the faith led children of time.
Sometimes I wonder who benefits most by our loving service? And I wonder if those who are served do not benefit from both the service rendered and the loving motive that delivers that service which brings succor and relief and perhaps hope?
The expression of compassion releases an effect that radiates throughout the universes and eternity itself. It shifts reality and alters perception by its results. It is the actualization of potential realized and unleashed into new and greater potential!!
171:7.4 (1874.7) Jesus could help men so much because he loved them so sincerely. He truly loved each man, each woman, and each child. He could be such a true friend because of his remarkable insight—he knew so fully what was in the heart and in the mind of man. He was an interested and keen observer. He was an expert in the comprehension of human need, clever in detecting human longings.
171:7.5 (1874. Jesus was never in a hurry. He had time to comfort his fellow men “as he passed by.” And he always made his friends feel at ease. He was a charming listener. He never engaged in the meddlesome probing of the souls of his associates. As he comforted hungry minds and ministered to thirsty souls, the recipients of his mercy did not so much feel that they were confessing to him as that they were conferring with him. They had unbounded confidence in him because they saw he had so much faith in them.
171:7.6 (1875.1) He never seemed to be curious about people, and he never manifested a desire to direct, manage, or follow them up. He inspired profound self-confidence and robust courage in all who enjoyed his association. When he smiled on a man, that mortal experienced increased capacity for solving his manifold problems.
171:7.7 (1875.2) Jesus loved men so much and so wisely that he never hesitated to be severe with them when the occasion demanded such discipline. He frequently set out to help a person by asking for help. In this way he elicited interest, appealed to the better things in human nature.
171:7.8 (1875.3) The Master could discern saving faith in the gross superstition of the woman who sought healing by touching the hem of his garment. He was always ready and willing to stop a sermon or detain a multitude while he ministered to the needs of a single person, even to a little child. Great things happened not only because people had faith in Jesus, but also because Jesus had so much faith in them.
171:7.9 (1875.4) Most of the really important things which Jesus said or did seemed to happen casually, “as he passed by.” There was so little of the professional, the well-planned, or the premeditated in the Master’s earthly ministry. He dispensed health and scattered happiness naturally and gracefully as he journeyed through life. It was literally true, “He went about doing good.”
171:7.10 (1875.5) And it behooves the Master’s followers in all ages to learn to minister as “they pass by”—to do unselfish good as they go about their daily duties.
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"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
Last edited by fanofVan on Tue Sep 21, 2021 12:22 pm +0000, edited 1 time in total.
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