To Suffer or to Serve?

About five years ago, my friend Sandy said something so profoundly insightful that it has stuck with me every since. “I think,” Sandy said to me, “that some of us are called to suffer and others are here to serve.” Though I can’t remember the question that invoked that response, the answer speaks for itself. “Some of us are here to suffer and others are here to serve.” I remember deciding then and there that if I could be lucky enough to avoid suffering, then I would find a way to be glad about serving. To me, anything was better than feeling pain.

Like a science experiment, I began to investigate this thing called service. What did it mean to be “in service” to someone? Was it like being a waiter in a restaurant or working overtime at the office? Was it changing diapers or cooking dinner? Was it joining the Junior League or volunteering at the hospital? I had engaged in sporadic bouts of volunteer work before, but I no longer needed another social outlet or a way to kill a Saturday afternoon. I needed a way to change my life. My boring, indulgent, materialistic, comfortable life. Where, I wondered, could I sign up for that kind of service?

I began to search a little deeper. I started reading the Bible and learning about the problems that so many in the world are facing. This gave me enough clarity to realize that in seeking a life of comfort, I was actually contributing to the suffering of others. I had also created a gaping hole of emptiness in myself. Prying my eyes (and my heart) open, I forced myself to recognize what I hadn’t wanted to see. My life had become a comfortable cage.

I had never minded the pain of hard work, as long as there was some kind of monetary reward or recognition attached to it. But the pain of loss, the pain of poverty, pangs of hunger, thirst, physical agony, and the ache of separation were almost foreign to me. And as I write this, they still are. But severe pain is not foreign to friends who have lost children, or suffered the betrayal of a spouse, or the misery of divorce. Pain is not foreign to elderly shut-ins or the wandering homeless. Pain is not foreign to the 800 million people who are starving or to untouchables who live in squalor.

But how could I – one small person – take on all the pain of the world and make it better? How could little old me do “service” like the great Bono, the glamorous Princess Di, the selfless Mother Theresa, the superstar humanitarian Angelina Jolie, or anyone else with a world stage? “If I have to follow role models like these,” I told myself, “then I am destined to fail.”

It was only after I stopped looking around and started looking up that I realized that in Jesus, the original suffering servant, I had everything I needed. Only he could lead me to me from complacency to contribution, from apathy to accomplishment, and from meaninglessness to meaning. And I’m glad to report that he has.

I have spent the past five years leaning into this thing called service. Service to my family, service to my church, and service to my community. Perhaps most important has been service to my calling, the unique contribution that only I (not Bono, nor Angelina, nor anyone else!) was created to make. I now realize why I had struggled to understand service and why my hobbies, intellectual pursuits, and even my volunteer work had never help my long-term interest. I had been doing service instead of being a servant.

As Christians, Jesus taught us that the meaning of life is very simple. “Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.” That is service in a nutshell. I’m not saying I get it right all of the time or that I’m dong it better than anyone else. When I take my eyes off my purpose, I sink as fast as a rock in water. When I get lost in looking around me and comparing myself, I am as let down as anyone else would be. But when I am doing it from the right place, I feel the difference that service makes. Far from drudgery, service has turned out to be an exhilarating way to activate my faith and connect with others.

In a strange twist of fate, service has also taught me the worthiness in suffering. In fact, you can’t become a servant unless you open yourself to the suffering of others. I no longer think pain sounds like the worst thing in the world, either. I know expectant mothers who have suffered the loss of pregnancies, where I was sure they would never get over the heartache. But they did, thanks to the outpouring of love they received from friends and community. Serving lunch to the homeless, I look into the eyes of hungry men. More often than not, I see not pain, but gratitude, and a strange kind of peace emanating from their smeared faces. There must be something purifying about pain, as there is with service. The two go hand in hand.

When servants and communities of service come together, they can cause a sea change to happen. Take the green movement. There are literally hundreds of thousands of organizations, from individual dot.causes to billion-dollar non-profits, collectively working to alleviate the suffering of the planet and its people. Paul Hawken calls this force A Blessed Unrest. I simply call it a blessing, and I’m so glad to get to be part of it.

To suffer or to serve? The answer doesn’t matter, so long as we use either one as a conduit to God. “To serve thyself” is the only road with a dead end.

Anna Clark is president of EarthPeople, a sustainability consulting firm. She is an author, speaker, and blogger on green living and leadership. Anna lives in Dallas with her husband and two toddlers in one of the first LEED-certified Platinum residences in Texas. Visit www.annamclark.com for more on all things green.