Paradox of Service

I'm 99% positive that in ever Sunday school, Young Women's, or any church lesson on service for that matter, the paradoxical statement that serving, a sacrifice, allows you to prosper. This seems senseless- if you give something up you shouldn't gain more, correct? Correct. But not. This is one of the amazing elements of service.

This paradox is illuminated upon reading the speech Why Giving Matters, given by Arthur C. Brooks, who was president of the American Enterprise Institute during 2009. (This speech can be found here: http://speeches.byu.edu/?act=viewitem&id=1826). He explains the statistics better than I ever could:

"I worked for months with my computer in my darkened office to get my conclusion. The conclusion was, sure enough, that when people get richer, they tend to give more money away. But I also came up with the following counterintuitive finding: When people give more money away, they tend to prosper.
Specifically, here’s what I found. If you have two families that are exactly identical—in other words, same religion, same race, same number of kids, same town, same level of education, and everything’s the same—except that one family gives a hundred dollars more to charity than the second family, then the giving family will earn on average $375 more in income than the nongiving family—and that’s statistically attributable to the gift."

Brooks further explains that he couldn't believe the statistics actually lived up to the paradox; he couldn't bring himself to publish the findings until he accepted why this is true. This is the paradox of service- you get more than you give. 

Service: An Introduction

serv·ice

  [sur-vis]

noun     an act of helpful activity; help; aid: to do someone a service.


Service is a word you hear often growing up in the LDS Church. You're taught principles of service, you plan service activities, you attend service activities, and you're encouraged to incorporate service into your daily actions. Maybe you love service. Maybe you enjoy the satisfaction that comes from helping others. Maybe service is something you dread, but you do it because you feel guilty otherwise. 

Well guess what. I think service is wonderful. But I also think there are flaws in how it is presented. 

I didn't always think this way; it all started when I took a class in Fall 2013 at Brigham Young University called Learning Through Service. This opened my eyes to all of the ineffective forms of service. 

Ineffective forms of service?

Yeah. I didn't know that was real. I thought all service was good- even if it doesn't achieve the desired results, at least you're trying, right? As long as you try, you get blessings, right? Right. But wrong. 

My goal for this blog is to unravel some of the misunderstandings concerning service. Hopefully by first understanding there are ineffective forms of service, learning through service will allow an improvement which will alter interactions within society.  


"In serving others you will find yourself."
-President Spencer W. Kimball