Dissident Reflections: Concrete Service

(Augsburger prt 7) For this chapter, instead summarizing/reflecting-on its ideas I just want to leave a quote from it that I think sums-up what service should be. It is perhaps above all a condition of the heart that produces service, whether necessary-service and voluntary-service, rather than someone who strives to do good things just because they are supposed to (which most often leads to burn-out or turns into resentful efforts).

Service that is necessary—required, owed, obligated, contracted—may be offered with genuineness, concern, compassion, and thoroughness.  Or it can be done grudgingly, of necessity under duress.  One does what has to be done.

Service that is voluntary falls into a completely different category.  It arises out of unbidden concern, undemanded interest, unowed compassion.  This is the service that comes close to being the actions of love.  It is offered by free choice because of the nature of the servant.  One does what one sees as needed. 

Most service is mixed, with necessary and voluntary aspects occurring together.  Perhaps one serves because it is a career—a chosen course—and for a salary does what is necessary, fulfilling all requirements. But when one goes beyond what is expected, the service becomes voluntary; when one gives without self-centered motivation, the caregiving becomes an act of freedom; when one transcends what is expected or required, one serves joyfully, freely, out of the exuberant excess called love.  Service moves from the quid pro quo of “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” to the practice of benevolence and sacrifice in meeting others’ needs. 

Spirituality meets service as it calls one to go the second mile, to offer the second act of caring, to reach out without asking, “But what’s in it for me?” Spirituality is the voluntary element in serving another that links persons with loving concern; spirituality is the voluntary connection of social interest, fellow-feeling, and mutual aid…

…Spirituality and service are sometimes viewed as direct opposites.  Spirituality is believed to be detached from tasks of life, the concrete acts of caregiving, the mundane, the routine, the earthly, the material; the spiritual reaches toward transcendent, the ineffable, the heavenly… Spirituality in a tripolar key does not divide the heavenly from the earthly, the sacred from the profane. All can be viewed as service when service is defined as work done in voluntary, caring relationship.[1]    

Do you agree… disagree?  Think about it.

[1] David Augsburger Dissident Discipleship (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazo Press 2006), 156-157.