SOMEthing

Warning: the very first sentence of this post will immediately make you start thinking up excuses not to listen to anything else I have to say.

I’d like to talk today about service.

Now, if you’re a regular attendee of any church that regularly speaks on this subject (like mine) then that sentence immediately sets off a chain of almost physiological Pavlovian responses as soon as you hear it.  First, there’s the fight or flight conflict to resolve, or in this case, the guilt-or-get-out conflict.  If you choose to leave (as I have on a few occasions) then you avoid the guilt you know you’re about to experience if you stay, but you’re also the person who gets up and just leaves as soon as someone’s begun their talk.  (Kids are a wonderful loophole for this entire problem, since they always provide an excused absence from the chapel at any time, but that’s a topic for another blog) On the other hand, you could stay.  I normally slouch down a little in my seat and immediately become fascinated with the hymnbooks in front of me even though I’ve been looking at the same ones since I was three weeks old. 

Whatever the case is, the immediate response to being informed that you’re about to hear a talk on service is avoidance in some form.  We all know why.  We don’t do enough. No one does.  Not a single person who pays attention to a service talk walks away saying “Yup, that’s one commandment I’ve got down pat. On to the next.”  Commandments like Tithing or the Word of Wisdom or Chastity, those you can (most of the time) say that either you’re following the law or you’re not.  Not to say that those don’t include room for improvement even for the best among us, but they’re fairly cut and dry. Am I giving ten percent of my gross income in a faithful tithe? Check.  Am I keeping the counsel put forward in the Word of Wisdom pertaining to dietary and practical guidelines? Check. Do I have sexual relations only with my legally married spouse? Check.  Those are things you can pretty much know you’re doing right.  But even if you volunteer forty hours a week at a soup kitchen, mow your senior citizen neighbor’s yard and give a weekly contribution to the March of Dimes, there is still more than you could be giving. 

In short, service is not a pass/fail commandment.  Too bad, I like those. 

I admit very freely, it’s not my strong suit either.  I’m not writing this post because I think it is at all. Far from it.  I suck at giving service.  I’m terrible at giving up my time, because I want so desperately to hold onto the time that I have.  The few hours a day after work that I get to spend with Adam and my best friend, that other parent of his.  Those are precious to me. I want every minute, every moment of them that I can hang onto for myself.  When I lose them, for whatever reason, my day feels empty. It’s like I ate all my vegetables like an obedient little child and then got the main course and dessert of the day snatched away from me anyway.  I feel very much like that attitude of selfishness regarding our own time is incredibly universal.  I’m incredibly selfish with that time, and though I know that’s still a fault I possess, it’s not my worst one by a long shot, so it might be a while before I get around to working on it.

This is not a talk on service by any means, but there’s one central comment that I’d like to make about it.  I recently went over to help out two friends of ours, a couple who’d just moved into a lovely townhouse.  Tons more space than their old place, incredibly good deal, they’re very excited about heading into it and stretching out a little bit.  So they’re painting everything in the house before they move their stuff in at the end of the month, and they say they’d like some help painting.  Sure, no problem. Anyone with reasonable manual dexterity can work a paintbrush, I figure. I’m no Picasso, but I can do my best to avoid the molding when doing the little detail work around the edges.  Few hours on a Saturday.  I admit, it’s certainly not my ideal way of spending a chunk of my weekend, but they know that, I know that, anyone who’s ever had a weekend knows that.  But they’re my friends and I want to help them, so I say yes and go over there.

Now, I like these people. They’re fairly awesome.  But by no stretch of the imagination do I consider them close friends.  I, personally, just haven’t known them that long or that well to say that they’re people I have a particularly close, frequent or intimate friendship with.  So they’re more than acquaintances, but less than BFFs.  They’re friends.  Good middle ground. 

And yet I’m pretty much the only person who showed up to help them paint.

I’m sorry . . . really?

I don’t mean this as a comment on these two at all. Like I said, they’re great people, I enjoy them thoroughly.  But for people that awesome to have only a peripheral acquaintance show up to help them paint their new home? That’s . . . that’s not okay.  And it shows, I think, my point from earlier, that selfishness with our own time is a universal trait.  Yes, it was Saturday afternoon on the nicest day of the year so far.  No, no one wants to spend that kind of day inside painting.  But come on. They were doing it alone, and it was a lot to do.

Is the painted or unpainted nature of the walls of their own home ultimately the responsibility and prerogative of the couple in question? Yes. No argument there.  Are they perfectly capable of getting all of it done? Yes, I know they are. Though I’m not sure time-wise how quickly that will happen.  But are there other people around them who could look at them, realize they’re in a place of need, and pop out of their own selfishness for just a few hours and do this thing to help ease their way? Yes. There are.  I know there are.  There are people around all of us who are capable of giving, capable of helping, capable of reaching out a hand to help give you a little nudge when you’re faltering and get you back on track.  It doesn’t take much to make a person feel that you care about them and really want to help them.  I know they are surrounded by people, tons and tons of them, who have the capacity to have been there to help them paint their house and make the work go more quickly.  I just don’t know where those people were, and it broke my heart to see the stress on their faces when they realized no one else was really showing up but me. 

So the comment that I would like to make about service is not that we need to be doing more or that we need to be making sure our hearts are in it or that we give all that we possibly can to those around us.  Realist that I am, I’m aware that the second I engage in any of those platitudes that have been spouted on a weekly/daily/hourly basis from the pulpits of churches across the world, minds shut off.  Guilt sets in, and rationalization comes in to act as the antivenom of that guilt.  That doesn’t work. Never has, never will.  What I would like to say is this:

Do something.

I’m not suggesting that anyone overhaul their lives for the greater good and go looking for an unfriendly sword to fall on for anyone else. But if you keep the perspective of doing something for those around you on a regular basis, a paid meal, a helpful contact for someone in need of some assistance, tech support, putting air in a person’s tires when they need it, helping to paint, helping to move, just helping to watch a kid when a pair of parents need a night to be adults for a change, if you want to do something for someone else, you’ll find an opportunity around you.  If you don’t want to, you’ll make excuses whenever opportunities do present themselves to you.  That’s just how the brain works. Guilt-or-go-home.  If we just do SOMEthing, the world would be a much merrier place, and there would be fewer couples standing in their living rooms right now looking at a half-painted room and only a few days to get all of their stuff moved in, with just the two of them.  No one wants that. No one wants to BE that, and no one wants to force someone else to have that happen to them.

I’m glad I did something. It wasn’t a big deal to me, it wasn’t some huge sacrifice, and it doesn’t need to be. I hope it made a difference to them for the better, and that I didn’t get too much paint on the molding in the process. 

Just do something.  The world spins smoother that way.