I Discovered the Truth About Serving

The Serving Role We All Avoid

Image by 政徳 吉田 from Pixabay

When I was in grade 10, Ms Barker asked us how we could serve each other to create a friendly and constructive environment for all of us in a class.

“Caring for each other!”

“Listen before talking!”

We shouted different answers, and Ms. Barker wrote them on the board.

“Do nothing.”

Luke, the guy sitting at the corner, who was always quiet, answered.

The class went silent. We all had the same question in our minds…

What?

“What did you say?” Ms Barker was clearly angry as she stopped writing and turned around.

“I said, do nothing.”

“We’re trying to create a constructive environment by helping each other here! Who are you to just sit down and do nothing while everyone plays a part in this group?” Ms Barker shouted at Luke as she slowly walked towards the back of the class. “I give you one more chance. How can we create a constructive environment here?”

“Like I said, do nothing.”

“Fine. Stay after class after today!!” She turned around and started walking back to the board, as Luke still sat there without regret.

We were all puzzled. We didn’t understand why Luke would say something bizarre like that. We whispered to each other, theorizing why he might say such a thing.

“Maybe he’s a jerk?”

“Or maybe he never cared about anyone?”

---

After class, I decided to ask Luke about his weird answer.

“Who’s going to be served while everyone serves?”

I was stunned. I didn’t know how to answer that question. I’ve never thought about it, yet it’s a question that needs answering.

Ya, who’s going to be served if everybody serves?

To me, serving is me bowing down to whoever’s being served. And this idea of me being served felt like I was some kind of royalty to whoever was serving me.

I mean, it just feels weird to be served. Serving others feels much more natural because I feel more comfortable when my value is lower than others.

But if everybody serves, isn’t that just a competition of who has the lowest value among us?

Something’s gotta fix this.

Like somebody willing to be that royalty to others, do nothing, and be served by others.

Isn’t that serving too? Being willing to do something they don’t want to do for the sake of others?

Serving is being humble before others. It’s about treating others higher than us.

So treating others lower than ourselves is also a form of service?

Something just doesn’t feel right…

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I decided to ask Luke again about this serve-by-being-served thing.

“Humility is not self-abasement.”

I froze again, cranked my brain to maximum clock speed, and tried to comprehend his statement.

Of course, they aren’t the same, but what’s the difference?

I was about to ask what he meant; he read my mind and explained the difference.

“Humility is respect, while self-abasement is selfishness.”

It left me pondering again. “How?”

“Humility is thinking of how others see you, regardless of higher or lower in value. Self-abasement is that you only care about what you see about yourself, and caring only about yourself being less valuable than others.”

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It still didn’t make sense to me how being higher than others is being humble, but something that I understood was that humility was not about value but about respect — respecting that others treat me as more valuable than them and playing that role.

When we serve, we often serve by self-abasement. It’s easy because we feel at ease when serving others when we treat ourselves as slaves.

As we serve each other by self-abasement, we go down an endless spiral of contesting who has the lowest value and who gets to serve.

Turns out, we’re not serving each other. We’re competing against each other, fighting for the honour of service — that the winner gets to serve everyone.

However, when we serve with humility, we respect each other’s needs. We serve those who need us, and we allow others to serve us when we have needs. This mutual respect helps us accomplish something we would never be able to reach alone.

Serving others is about being humble in front of others and respecting their needs. If they require somebody to serve, then being served is recognizing their need, respecting their need, and a service to whoever’s serving.

We need to learn to be served. Only then would we know the truth about serving and how to serve others.