Service! Service! Service!

Prefer to read? Here’s a transcription of the video:

I want to talk today about service, which is such an important value in all spiritual traditions.

Because service is about giving of yourself, giving of your time and your resources to help others–others in need, helping your world, giving of yourself. So it makes sense that is a really significant and important value in all spiritual traditions. But there’s something that’s skewed about it, I find in our culture because we can’t all be Mother Theresa and somehow service has become about being very, very noble and doing something very noble, like mother Theresa. And the fact is that we need so many professions and so many services in our world in order to make our world go round, that to only see the most noblest of things as service and the rest is our work or mundane things that we need to do is really disrespectful to all the other professions and doesn’t allow us to live with integrity doing what we love doing and serving the world for what we love doing.

It’s as if certain things qualify as service and other things, while we do it with passion and with love, and we put time into it and years of hard work or study and we do it with so much love and care and with this intention to save the world, but if it’s not something noble, then it doesn’t count. Think about it. It’s kind of crazy making.

So the first thing to do is to change the word noble with sacred. Because what you do in your life, in your work, if it’s a hobby, if you’re being paid for it or not, if you see that activity, that passion of yours as sacred, then you are serving. Because we need a Baker and we need an accountant and we need a nurse and we need a driver and we need all these professions. All these professions, those that we’ve classified as noble service and those that we’ve classified as just work. We need all of them.

So instead of dividing them into this is noble and this is not, let’s start looking at what we do as sacred. And if you can say, I’m doing this with integrity, I love what I’m doing, this is my life purpose, this is my calling, and you offer it as a sacred offering, then you are serving.

So the Baker who bakes bread and wakes up at 4:00 AM to bake the bread, and he’s doing this with love and passion and and their expertise and their care and their creativity and innovation. Everything that they bring, their aesthetics, all of that, all of these qualities which we consider to be spiritual, when they bring that to the baking of the bread that they do, they are serving the world. They are serving the world through their self-expression, being aligned to their calling and they’re bringing bread, nourishment to people who are enjoying the flavor, the taste, the nourishment, breaking bread together, so community.

So let’s first begin by not dividing professions and what we do into noble and not noble. Instead, the measurement should be are you doing it in a sacred way? And if you see what you do as sacred, then you are serving the world.

There’s a quote by Howard Thurman that I just love. He says, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it? Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” I love that quote. When I heard it, it just changed my perspective around service that it’s not about looking outside, it’s looking inside so that I am the most aligned to what I’m supposed to be doing and how I am supposed to be serving the world. So it’s connecting to the spiritual aspect of what I do, its material expression and doing it with sacredness.

And if I do that, then it’s not about Naval gazing and me and me and me. It’s about me serving to the best of my capacity, what I’ve been given in this lifetime. The gifts I have, the capabilities I have, the the area that I live in, whatever profession that I do, it’s about doing it to the best of my capacity, but with a sacredness. That’s what turns it into service.

At one of my speaking events, a man came to me after my talk and said, “Thank you for reframing my experience of buying male shirts because I love buy men’s shirts. But I always felt it was a luxury. But now I suddenly see that someone out there, their calling is to create men’s shirts. And if they do that with all their creativity and all their love and good intentions, because we need men’s shirts, and if someone was born and they feel it, that is their service, then that’s how they’re serving the world.”

So the way to reframe service is does it make you come alive and are you doing it from a sacred place of integrity? That’s how you can restore spiritual-material balance to your work, to your hobby, and to your service.

And so you can try by asking yourself, what is spiritual about what I’m doing? What is spiritual about my work? What is spiritual about my self expression? What is spiritual about the hobbies I have about my interactions? How do I serve when I do my work? And you’ll start seeing that in what you do. That may seem like just a physical material, mundane activity or product or service, there are spiritual qualities in there that connect you to the essence of who you are, that give you meaning and purpose and fulfillment. And when you do it from that aligned place with a sense of sacredness, then you are serving the world.

Leave me a comment below. I’d love to hear what you think about this. How you see you are serving the world. What qualities do you offer through your services or products? How do you serve the world?

Blessings.