Shelley argues for shifting from helping to serving. Helping creates unequal relationships where the recipient feels diminished and indebted. Serving, rooted in your own wholeness, treats others as equals and fosters mutual healing without debt.
Chapters
Hey friends, Shelley here, taking a quick 3 minutes to dig deeper into the value of selfless service. Today, instead of adding to the noise of what already exists in our culture around this concept, we are going to simplify it and focus on just one word: serve. St. Teresa, Mother Teresa, she's our inspiration today. Really, her entire life work can be pulled down into this one quote from her. We serve life not because it is broken, but because it is holy. Now, in present times, this concept of serving has been delineated very well by Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, and she's addressing the difference between the words "help" and "serve." What do you think about the question, "How can I help?" Do you say that to others? "How can I help?" How do you feel when other people say it to you? "How can I help?" Dr. Raymond is posing that while that question might be really meaningful to you, perhaps there's a deeper question that we can consider instead of how can I help? How can I serve? The lesson here is that serving is different from helping, and helping is actually based on inequality. You see, when we help, it's not a relationship between equals. Dr. Raymond is teaching us that when you help, you use your own strength to help someone of perhaps lesser strength. If we're really attentive into what's going on inside of us when we help, she says that we'll find that we're always helping people who are not as strong as we are, or helping people who are needier than we are. And people feel this inequality. When we're helping, we may inadvertently be taking away from people more than we could ever even be giving them. We might be diminishing their self-esteem, their sense of worth, their integrity, and their wholeness. So when I help, I'm very aware of my own strength, but when we serve, we don't serve from our strength. She teaches us that it is through our wholeness in which we serve. The wholeness of us serves the wholeness of another person. Thank you, Dr. Raman, for teaching us that service is a relationship between two people. Between two equals, while helping incurs debt. When you help someone, it's like they owe us. But when we serve, it's healing and it's mutual. I am served as the one that I am serving. I'm Shelley, reminding you that the needs of others will always be greater than our own. And as we head out into the world, let's try to help each other a little less and serve each other a little more. See you soon.
