At Your Service

by Frank Crocitto and illustrations by Leslie Bender, March 18, 2009

If you’ve ever been in love with someone, you know it is enough just to be with them. They can never ask too much of you. They might say, “Oh, I forgot the teaspoon,” and there you are, bouncing up and looking everywhere for a teaspoon. You never give it a second thought, it is never a burden, and you never think of fetching a teaspoon as an act of love, but it is.

In It’s a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart said he’d lasso the moon for Donna Reed. That’s how love speaks: “How can I serve you? What can I do for you? Just name it, I’ll do it.” It’s what parents do without hesitation for their children. That’s how love works.

What if you were able to act this way not only with your family or your husband or wife or children, but with everybody, all the time? It can happen that way as well. You’ve probably experienced it at some time.

You know how it is when you work alone at a very large, difficult job? Let’s say you’re going to paint your kitchen, tear out those flimsy plywood cabinets, put a nice new floor down. Do it alone and it’s torture. Endless. You’re halfway through, it’s two weeks later, you’re eating sheetrock dust for dinner every night and beginning to question your sanity. “What was I thinking?”

Then, someone knocks on the door and says, “Hi, I just came to help.” What happens to the work? It’s not half as hard, it’s many times less hard. And then another person comes by. Maybe they’ve got a bad back and can’t do the heavy stuff but they bring a meal around or offer to take the kids for a while or walk the dog. The work gets even easier—not just a third easier, a lot easier. More gets accomplished with less effort. You find the jobs you were dreading aren’t as daunting as they seemed, you’ve got new energy, the job is hardly a job anymore.

That’s a good analogy for what happens when a few people understand service and can serve. What happens isn’t something arithmetic—it’s exponential. What’s formed is a sort of generator that’s able to compound whatever energy is there.