I heard something insightful today: It’s hard to really serve that which we don’t love.
You can tough it out and serve for a season even if you don’t love. You can be nice and act the part in public if you don’t love.
But fully serving someone is impossible if you don’t love them. Serving them with your actions, with your words, with your time – your success is dependent on how much you love.
The Source of Problems
If you struggle to serve someone, it’s because you’re struggling to love them.
If you struggle to serve your spouse, to serve your children, to serve your community, to serve your church, to serve the poor, the serve fellow believers, to serve the lost, to serve the broken-hearted – it’s because you struggle to love.
Perhaps one love is swallowing another. Maybe our love of money dominates our love for our family – leading to long nights at the office away from home. Maybe our love for entertainment and leisure is greater than our love for our fellow man. We’d never consciously think that, and we detest the idea that we could prioritize in such a way. But examine yourself – is that true of you?
And the source of loving others is our love for God himself. Is a waning love for God responsible for our reluctance to serve?
When we have issues attending to the various areas of our life, we often point to a lack of time or an abundance of responsibilities. Or we tell ourselves that the problem is our disorganization.
We look to new methods or planning techniques as the fix. And to be fair, we do want to do those things excellently and there is much room for improvement there.
But what if the real problem isn’t how we do things, but why we do things?
Some of the links in this post may be affiliate links. However, this doesn’t affect what I write about, what I choose to say, or what I recommend. Learn more here.