Written By Alan Good
When caring for a loved one, we may want to ask, “How can I help?” But is this the right question? Perhaps there is a deeper question we can consider.
Perhaps the real question should be, “How can I serve?” Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on inequality; it is not a relationship between equals. When we help, we use your own strength to help those of lesser strength. Perhaps we are helping someone who’s needier.
Recipients may feel this inequality. When we help, we may inadvertently take away from them more than we give by diminishing their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity and wholeness.
Helping can make us very aware of our own strength. But we don’t serve with our strength, we serve with ourselves. We draw from all our experiences. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others. Service is a relationship between equals, not a debt inferred by helping.
When we help someone, they owe us. But serving, like healing, is mutual. No debt involved. Serving is performed with a feeling of gratitude, not satisfaction. These are very different things.
Serving is also different from fixing. When we fix a person, we perceive them as broken, and their brokenness requires me to act. We do not see the wholeness in the other person or trust the integrity of the life in them. Serving is responding to the other person’s wholeness and cooperating with that wholeness.
Fixing can be a form of judgment. All judgment creates distance, a disconnection, an experience of difference. We cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected, that which we are willing to touch.
Mother Teresa’s basic message was to serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.
A fixer has the illusion of being causal. A server knows that they are being used and have a willingness to be used in the service of something greater, something essentially unknown. When we fix or help, we have a particular idea in mind. We “know” the other’s needs.
The bottom line, of course, is that we can fix or help without serving. And we can serve without fixing or helping. Fixing and helping may often be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul. They may look similar if you’re watching from the outside, but the inner experience is different.
