Gaining Strength Through Service

In Sacrament meeting today, the first speaker spoke about service. He said that, in the church, we gain many opportunities to serve each other and others outside of our wards. We get so many service opportunities, in fact, that we often feel spread thin, and we think that it is important to our physical and spiritual welfare that we pass up on some of those service opportunities and we spend that time on ourselves instead. After all, you can't pour water out of an empty jug. There comes a time when you have to stop pouring and refill the jug.

Yet, the speaker's talk wasn't about the wisdom of avoiding service opportunities but the strengthening effects of taking them. The previous analogy, with us being us being represented by jugs of water, doesn't actually hold water itself. It may seem like we only have finite resources, and that may be true, but we have a potential for an infinite capacity to carry and use those resources. We are composed of sets of muscles. the more you use muscles, the stronger they get, and the easier it gets to use those muscles without tiring out. If a person who has never exercised tries to jog a mile, they'll burn themselves out fairly quickly, but if that same person keeps exercising, eventually that mile-long jog will be a piece of cake to them.

Of course, we can burn ourselves out doing too much service, but the more service we do, the easier it'll become for us, and the less energy it'll take for us to do it. So maybe I shouldn't focus so much on how difficult it can be to have so many obligations, including the obligation to take on more obligations when church leaders ask me to, and instead focus on developing my service muscles so I can handle of the obligations I currently have, plus any more I gain as I move forward. Doing service can be exhausting, but, ironically, the more service we do, the less exhausting it gets.