Service – Day 1

“Can you serve yourself?” I asked a friend who stopped by for dinner.

“No problem,” he joked. “Being self-serving is something I do well.”

Serving others was first handed to me as a lifeline in early sobriety. I was in treatment for drug addiction, and people told me that if I want to help myself, I need to get involved in activities that serve others. I needed—at least for a few minutes each day—to forget about myself and think about someone else. It seemed odd to me that when there was so much to worry about in my own life, I needed to extend myself to others.

“If I don’t think about me, who will?” I wondered.

A pattern began to emerge. If I engaged in activities that served others, life began to respond lovingly to what I needed too. The right thought, word, or action appeared. The right people, mentors, and helpers also appeared along the way. The right job showed up, sometimes a much better job than I would have thought I deserved.

Later, I got tangled up in this lifeline. I needed to back off from service for a while and get clear about what felt right to give. I tried to serve in impossible ways. I tried to make people stop doing things they didn’t want to stop doing. I lost my clarity on what I was doing and why.

When my son died, I didn’t have anything to give. I thought, “Why help others, why serve them, if I can never have what I want in life and if this pain is my reward?” That experience was necessary to my grief—the cocooning, the backing off, the healing of my own wounds. But there came a time when I wanted a life again. And the only way to get a life was to give and to serve.

With all its pitfalls and lessons, service isn’t just a value that can help in our lives. It’s a value that can open up miraculous possibilities.

Value: Serving others, in a way that respects them and us, is the value for this week.

From the book: 52 Weeks of Conscious Contact

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