From Neal A. Maxwell’s book ‘All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience,’ we read:
“When we see things as they really are,” we shall see others and ourselves as we really are. Let us, therefore, define service to others as including genuine listening—a listening that is more than being patient until it is our turn to speak; rather, a listening that includes real response, not simply nodding absorption.
Let us think of service not only as giving, but also as receiving righteously. Parenthetically, one of the many reasons some of today’s children have not learned to give is that some parents do not know how to receive.
We can serve others also by developing real integrity, which is more than being honest and true only until it becomes too expensive. In the crowds of chameleons in the world today, daring to be the same good self is being different. When our goodness is constant we are on the road, albeit only a short distance long, to an unvaryingness of Godlike love.
Let our service, at times, include a willingness to hold back in conversation when what we would have said has already been said—and perhaps better. To contribute, not money, but time and space, so that another can expand is to reflect a quiet nobility. There are so many times when to forgo is to make way for another.
Let us in our professional and vocational chores serve with excellence even if others care more and more about pay and less and less about quality in their workmanship.
Serving also requires us to know that we should not be worrying over our own adequacy when our concern is really over how we look rather than about what we have given. There is a marked difference between the introspection that focuses on “How did I do?” and the introspection that asks, “Did I do enough?”
Moffatt’s translation of Paul’s great chapter on love says that “love is never glad when others go wrong.” But true love also includes real rejoicing when others do well—even if their success seems to change, somehow, our own place in the mortal peck order, but when we rejoice righteously in the accomplishments of others, we are truly lifted up.
Genuine responsiveness to the achievements of others is a noble, though subtle, way to serve. It means, of course, that there will be times when we applaud and no one notices our pair of happy hands, and no one even hears our added decibels—except us and the Lord. There are so many times when genuine human service means giving graciously our little grain of sand, placing it reverently to build the beach of brotherhood. We get no receipt, and our little grain of sand carries no brand; its identity is lost, except to the Lord.
And why not? The greatest act of service in all history—the atonement—was clearly unappreciated. It was understood only by the Savior and the Eternal Father while it was in process. But it was completed to the glory and eternal benefit of all humanity. When Jesus groaned the words “It is finished,” immortality had just begun—for billions upon billions of souls.
We can serve by not endorsing, in word or deed, the seductive slogans of the world, by refusing to be trendy when those trends would take all who follow them toward destruction.
In this respect the young will live to see a certain madness in some majorities in the world in a way heretofore thought impossible. . . . (Written in 1980, we were the young then = prophecy fulfilled?)
~ Neal A. Maxwell, from his book “All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience”, Deseret Book Company, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1980 p. 62-64
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience, and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
