And now these things remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Cor 13:13
I believe in serving, but I can’t really just write a 500 word essay about me serving. That would be like a humble man telling people he’s extremely humble. So instead of talking about me serving I’m going to talk about WHY I serve. Now, I’ve thought about this a lot. And before I figured out the right answer I came up with a couple of not so right possibilities. I could serve because it’s the right thing to do, I could serve because maybe someone will see it, or I could serve because it makes me feel good inside. Two of the three things I just listed are selfish but not entirely bad, because there’s still some serving being done.
I’m somewhat of a pushover, and whenever someone asks me to do something I usually say yes. I find “no” to be a very awkward thing to say to someone asking for a favor, even a really big one. For a while, I convinced myself I serve because being selfless is a virtue and I’m practicing it. But over time I have come to find that practicing selflessness makes me very selfish. By making serving about practicing selflessness I had removed the other person from the equation. Serving wasn’t about the other people anymore. Serving was about being more selfless, not about caring for the other person.
After a while of being selfish I got burnt out on it and really didn’t like people very much anymore. Oh, I still served. But it was grudgingly and with a lot of huffawing and sighing so that the other people knew that I was going through a lot of trouble to serve them. Which made me more selfless. Serving to be more selfless had taken out the soul of serving. It made serving hollow and selfish. It was only after I had hurt one of my best friends that I learned why I should be serving.
My friend and I were helping out at our campus fellowship’s Senior Farewell, which is a graduation party for the seniors in our fellowship. Through some unfortunate events I got a parking ticket while setting up for the party. Returning from my car after seeing the ticket, my friend had come over to ask me to help with something. I snapped at her and blamed her unfairly for my ticket. I mean seriously, I had just gotten a ticket because I was serving. (Actually I got the ticket for parking illegally and being too lazy to move my car.) Who was she to keep asking me to help? Coudln’t she see how selfless I was already being?! Well, this attitude didn’t fly very well, and my friend was really hurt by it.
It was here, looking back at why I was doing the things that I was doing that I realized that all the serving I had done had been for nothing, because it had been about me. It had been about being selfless, not about being loving. Not that being selfless is a bad thing, but being loving is so much greater.
1 Corinthians 13: 4
If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
