The Definition of True Service
true service
By Niki Vaith
NYLC Youth Advisory Council
"Service" is a crazy word. You might think of service as serving food at a soup kitchen or visiting a nursing home once in awhile. You may think service is the word that requires you to get up and walk five miles to be a part of an organization. This type of service is called "charitable volunteering," and we need it to keep our nation strong.
I challenge all of you to be more than charitable volunteers. Volunteer where your heart is. Service is about learning, growing, and working together to meet genuine needs. Service is done to meet the needs of others, not to make you feel better. Never assume you know whats best for someone else.
Service engages you in an activity: You could be learning a trade such as the proper way to paint the interior of a house, or growing culturally by working together with people from different backgrounds. While learning, you could be helping out. And true service should involve reflection, because it is only by reflecting on our actions that we learn. The service-learning I've performed over the past four years has helped me learn who I am.
Serve to learn. Serve to give back. But most importantly, serve to be an instrument of your gifts and talents, and to help where help is needed. It may be a new concept to some, but service is a two-way street. When you go into a service project, don't approach it with the idea that you're there to help those people. Enter the project knowing you are going to engage people and grow together. Only then can we do justice to the word service.
I want to share with you with the most inspirational words on service that I have ever heard
If you want to be important wonderful. If you want to be recognized wonderful. If you want to be great wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That's your new definition of greatness. By giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love. And you can be that servant. Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Drum Major Instinct," delivered on February 4, 1968, at Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia.
