Always

Saturday Morning

I remembered last night, but I pretended I didn't. I'll set my alarm and see if I want to go when it wakes me up...
Alarm. 

Five more minutes? 

Snooze.

Alarm.

Snooze...again? 

Guilt. 

Get out of bed.

Put on sweats, put my hair in a ponytail. 

Go grab gloves, a bucket, and a shovel.

Off to the youth service activity...

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"Unselfish Service" --Dallin H. Oaks

"The Spirituality of Service" --Derek A. Cuthbert

"Service" --Steven E. Snow

"Finding Joy Through Loving Service" --Russell C. Taylor

"She Stretched Out Her Hand to the Poor" --Barbara B. Smith

"The Service That Counts" --Thomas S. Monson
"Service, A Divine Quality" --Carlos H. Amado

"Why Do We Serve?" --Dallin H. Oaks

"Sacrifice" --Dallin H. Oaks

Always

Why does the hesitation always come? Never want to go sacrifice and serve, seems inconvenient. Then I start weeding with my friends in the ward. It becomes somewhat fun. 

Afterwards. 

Always afterwards. 

Always afterwards, happiness and gratitude flood in. 

Interview

The idea of posting on service came to me, as I mentioned previously, from an amazing course I took at BYU called Learning Through Service. The Professor, Casey Peterson, is also the director for the Center for Service and Learning at Brigham Young University. He became interested in service through "a lifelong pursuit as both a giver and receiver".

He changed my views on service, and so I asked him a few questions as I wanted you to have the same opportunity. 

Service to Casey Peterson is defined as "selfless sharing of time and talents to helping others as an instrument in God's hands." A major learning experience for me was when I realized that service isn't always effective. This realization allows for the opportunity to improve our methods of service. "Service can be ineffective when planned around the needs of the server, instead of the recipient. I believe some good will come from every effort to serve, but the efficiency increases as the awareness of the needs of the person being served is found."

He shared four suggestions to make our service more effective:

• Love
• Thought
• Reflection 
• Revelation

So, how does the Church of Latter-Day Saints exemplify effective service?
"Knowing the needs of cultures, individuals, and communities. Each response is specific to an area, well researched, and well planned. The larger picture is maintained well."

Lastly,
How can we incorporate effective service in our daily lives, jobs, school, and hobbies? "Continual prayer to be guided, a willingness to always act, and opportunities to continually reflect on what is happening."

Movie Review

     I recently watched a very interesting film, titled “Waste Land.” As I’ve been reflecting on what I saw, I’ve had a few thoughts that I would like to share with you! Yes, you could be broad and argue that recycling is a service because it saves the planet. And that’s just peachy, good, great…yeah! But I want to go deeper than this, like the film did, and make you realize that you can make a difference. 
     As this film explored the lives of a few particular pickers, it showed the transitioning of their lives as they helped create trash art. Each trash picker working at the landfill in Rio de Jeneiro reacted in similar ways:

•          They realized how life was comparatively, before and after.
•          They were grateful for their new perspective.
•         They wanted to make a difference.

     You may be wondering how this can relate to service? An understanding leads to a grateful heart and a desire to serve. 

     It becomes a cycling pattern for good. So take from that what you will, and maybe spend a night on Netflix watching “Waste Land.”

"I'd never imagined I'd become a work of art."

"I don't see myself in the trash anymore. I really don't."

"I have nothing to complain about in my life. Nothing, nothing at all. Oh man, if I complained God would punish me."

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