I love that when I sit down in a restraunt and a person comes up and asks that. On one hand it makes me a little uncomfortable, because I see MYSELF as the servant, so how is it that this fellow servant is offering to serve me? But on the other, I see a young person who..even if it is just for the job's sake...is learning a valuable phrase.
This morning in just a few quick paragraphs I'm going to reveal a secret about life that though I learned it early...I've tested it and observed it for decades and it is true. Ready? In general...show me a person unhappy with life, and you'll be showing me a person who is not very involved in sacrificing themselves for the building up or helping of others.
What!? Well, weve gone thru cycles in this world, there was a day where the common motivation/mindset within a person involved being a good neighbor, a helpful citizen, an encouraging friend to others....from this we've gone to being a neighbor to none, helping only ourselves, backstabbing others if we need to. Now the trend is even more radical...expecting others to be a good neighbor to us, expecting others to help us, serve us, encourage us, feed us, entertain us.
And ya know what...the corresponding level of satisfaction with life has plummeted. Its abysmal today. People are bored and miserable and mad at anybody whose life is in anyway inconveniencing them...ie..How dare they pull out in front of me! How annoying these handicap parking spaces are! Look at that guys yard with the tall grass and the broken mower...someone should call the city thats an eyesore...the list goes on. Its not pretty.
So all i've got to say about this is ...if you want to improve the quality of your life, improve the quality of someone else's instead...yours only gets filled up by overflow. Think being kind to all is easy? It takes years of practice to get even halfway decent at it. Opening doors for people, saying please , thank you, excuse me , and I'm sorry and "no, you go ahead, I know i got here first but you've got your hands full" and "can i get that for you?"...those are the amateur stages but they are a start.
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How true! How quick we are to take the defensive mode. I remember this wise Therapist from Austin, TX that was doing a seminar on personal enrichment. He told this story about how he was eating at a restaurant and the waitress was irritable and didn't seem too attentive. When he left, he left her a $100 tip. She came running after him and said, "Mr. I think you made a mistake, you left a $100 instead of a $1". He said, "No, I know you must be having a bad day so I left this so maybe it would help". At that, she began to cry and told him that she had just lost her child and just found out she had cancer". What if he had taken the defensive stand and said, no service no tip. We must all look past our own petty inconvenience don't you think?
Amen. Its really not that hard to get into the mindset of loving others. And when you truly love people...its much easier to react to rudeness with compassion. That is one of the greatest things I enjoy in reading the gospels.
Joan Osborne sings a song "what if God were one of us"...though some may find it less than reverential, I don't because I know there was a day when it really happened. When diety put on flesh and walked amongst man. When I read of how His compassion just poured out onto people that were "beneath" all the other good folk, it brings tears to my eyes.
When the woman caught in adultery was paraded before the multitude, and brought before the Lord not as an example of greatness...but thrown before Him as worthless...the humiliation in her and fear, was probably great enough to make her almost hope for the stoning to commence immediately. I can FEEL the feelings that must have been ramsacking her when Jesus first reacted by just squatting down and scratching something in the dirt...There is no way she could have anticipated His compassion, His mercy, His love...but it was there..all of it..more than imaginable. I want to love like that. He's my hero.
Nice post and interesting comments. I like that song too, particularly the phrase "If you were faced with him in all his glory
What would you ask if you had just one question" ... there's a interesting key there, I think, to happiness; the type of life people seem to live depends on the type of questions they ask themselves. And it's a skill to ask ourselves things in ways that aren't already sabotaged by the way the question is framed. (question your questions, heheh) That lyric causes most people to think hard about the nature of how they would form such a question, if they stop to ask themselves what they would ask that is. People with all the answers need not apply :-)
"You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5blbv4WFriM&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fbinarybonsai%2Ecom%2Farchives%2F2006%2F07%2F31%2Fdarth%2Dsmartass%2F
You should watch that.
Thanks adam..LOL...that was funny.
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