Serving in Home Religion
- This page is part of an ERW course: Home Church.
- By John Eagles, June 4, 2007.
Serving is a word we use for giving love or making offerings to others. I understand God as the source of love and God as the ultimate sacrificial being, serving the whole cosmos and all living beings in it.
The goal of religion is to become more like God, to get a closer relation to the origin, and by doing this fulfilling the highest purpose of our own existence. When we ask ourselves how to grow in love, the answer could be -- by serving others.
But serving people can be a tricky thing. We all have experienced how others sometimes make misuse of our love and service. Many people got so frustrated about giving love and serving others that they turned to becoming self-centered and don't want to serve and love anymore.
The question is then how to serve in such a way that we really benefit those whom we serve and also our own good development. For myself, there is only one answer. This answer is that serving others should be focused on doing what God would wish for such a person, or said in different terms, serving is to contribute something to the original and good development of someone else.
Because the Creator is the source of love, by expressing our love in a heavenly way to other people, our own love for people can grow and also our love for God.
Serving in this way is not at all an easy thing, because we have to continuously check if our service is contributing to something good. Much meditation or prayer is needed to find positive ways of serving others.
Another problem is to find the best possible expression of our service. We can serve in many different ways, by giving things or presents, by using our body to perform jobs for someone else, by teaching, by caring in different ways, by taking responsibility for problems of others.
Sometimes serving people turns into the opposite of what is desirable. We may serve people to only make them more dependent on us. In such a case we are not really giving service to them, because we don't contribute to that person's own good development. Sometimes we may serve someone whom we trust and later we discover that this person is not reliable and only made misuse of our sacrifices.
This makes serving others to one of the most complicated affairs in human life. It sounds so easy, to love and serve other people, but to do it in a positive way, we need to really take our time to discover in which way to serve. Sometimes the right way of serving may even be to oppose the goals that another person has. For example, when you discover that someone is a criminal, the best way of serving may be to ensure that this person comes behind bars. At other times, serving is the most enjoyable thing to do, when we meet people who are positive and who can appreciate what we did for them.
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