Service, A Divine Quality

My thoughts on Elder Amado's talk "Service, A Diving Quality"

Elder Amado spoke about something that is so close to my heart. In fact we make this a part of our schooling. Every Friday we serve at a local food bank for a couple of hours (until the job is done). It has been hard, but the rewards are great!

Three purposes of the Lord’s life: His atoning sacrifice, His doctrine, and His service. One of my favorites parts of the scriptures is when the Savior takes the children and blesses them, not because he has to but because he wants to serve them and bless them. Why do I could dinner? Yes, I have to—well sort of, they can make a mean PB&J—but because it is my way of saying “I love you” to my family.

Elder Amado has quite a bit of stuff on the blessings of service. “those who serve…” Interesting list. But I like the two paragraphs before the list. “Service makes us strong in our faith an useful in His kingdom.” We all need to feel needed and useful and we do buy doing our Visiting Teaching, home teaching and other callings. It is a blessing to just be useful and extra cool that we can strengthen our faith by being useful and needed.

“Kindness, love, patience, understanding and unity will increase as we serve, while intolerance, jealousy, envy, greed and selfishness decreases or disappear.” I TRULY NEED THIS BLESSING RIGHT NOW!!!! I need those things to decrease, so I guess I need to increase the others (so this will be short since it is almost dinner time).

I have two scriptures that are my mantra “I will go and do…” and “When ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.” I live my life according to those two scriptures.

Of course the best thing about the church is “by their fruits ye shall know them.” I have NEVER seen an organization who can have people on the ground in record time when disasters happen and truly MAKE A DIFFERENCE without thought to politics, religion, race, gender, etc. As I watch other organization duke it out for who was first, I know the church went in, accessed, moved forward, moved out and left a HUGE impact. I had a friend’s husband who is a truck driver and he was in Texas when Katrina hit and as he was leaving the area because of the approaching storm he noticed that at the truck stops around Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma, generic looking trucks that were from Salt Lake City. They were ready for the hurricane to hit and then move in. They held back just enough to be safe but when the storm was done, they were able to come in and be there. Another friend’s husband flies for a Fed Ex or is it UPS (not sure which) but he was called in to make flights into the area carrying LDS Humanitarian aid within 24 hours of the hurricanes arrival. By their fruits ye shall know them.