“Love isn’t love until you’ve given it away…”
As we continue our week long blog on Dr. King and the effects of soul power on our lives, we must recognize that soul power (love) has a twin sister; her name is service. Dr. Cornell West says “you can’t lead the people unless you love the people, and you can’t save the people unless you serve the love and service our 20 powers that together create great communities and great families and great people. Many of us are calling ourselves lovers of humanity and community yet we do not serve the community nor the people that we love.
This is antithetical to our values and nonsensical. How can you love something that you don’t serve. How can you be passionate about something for which you’re not prepared to work? Service is all about doing for others and making the plight of others more important than your own. We must in this year of 2012 be about service. As Dr. King would submit when speaking to the sanitation workers plight in the south; “the question is not ‘what will happen to THEM!” What happens to our city, our region, our State, our Nation, our world if we all decide to be so comfortable that we forget to serve others? I am afraid that many of us have forgotten the role service played in our climb to “success.” We must find ways to create a discipline of service.
One major reason that we may want to adopt love’s twins sister:
1. Service is acceleration upward mobility. I recently shared an article in my facebook post from Forbes magazine highlighting volunteerism and service as the number one way emerging leaders are accelerating their careers in America. Doing better for yourself starts with serving others. What you reap is a direct result of what you have sown. If you sow service in the other’s lives and’s love is what fuels that service you will surely reap great success in this life.
I personally have learned that the more you serve and the more you love, the less you have to worry about your own plight in the world. There seems to be an exponential power when you perform random acts of service fueled by your love for humanity. I encourage you today to think about your own schedule and your own life. If you have nothing outside of your family and your job that you currently serve on a regular basis, you are missing out on major blessing and major opportunity in your life. Service is required for a better future for ourselves. If we serve well; we lead well; and the recipients of that love and service can finally… live well.
Peace blessings and twins