Six Places to Serve

Serving Family

The people who raised us and those we have gathered as adults. This is family, most certainly the group we are primarily here to serve. We can express the Service of this Six year by giving to our families and to extended family of friends, in-laws, ex-es, birth-parents, custody sharers and in-home carers. Each of these people is a Spiritual entity with whom we have business. We are here to support the Soul Growth of each other: helpfulness is not difficult. Make a meal for busy adults; iron the backlog of clean laundry; offer child- or senior-care time so the carer can enjoy a relaxing bath.

Serving the Urge to Create

We each have entered this life to fulfill a destiny. For some there are large public roles. For most there is quiet unfolding as we grow into our wisdom.

From early childhood there is something within us that wants to create; make a mark; Say Something. This urge can be met through writing a poem or building a bookshelf or planting a garden. There are paintings and computer codes and massages which can be transmitted through our efforts into the physical world.  Serving these energies allows us to grow into our aligned place in the Cosmos.

Serving the Environment

People have always made changes to the way Nature arranges Herself. We have cleared land of its natural living layer in order to grow the plants of our choosing. We have cut trees to make space for our animals to graze. We have netted fish from the streams and positioned stepping stones to allow access to the other side.

With the galloping technology of the last century there are numerous changes to the shape of the world. There are many natural places that need help to recover from these adaptations. We can serve the environment through hands-on activity: beach clean-ups or litter-gathering with an Adopt a Highway program. We can actively encourage the use of travel mugs and fabric shopping bags to avoid the production of disposables; the littering potential and final disposition.  Environmental service could come through speaking, writing or offering interpretive visits to sites in need.

Serving Community

In modern cities we don’t necessarily identify as members of the entire metropolitan community. Yet every life has a supportive group. Every student has a school staff, including bus drivers and janitors and cafeteria workers as well as teachers and aides and administrators. Community is the Village that it takes to Raise a Child, and it is not based in geography. Peer groups can help you as you help others through family illness or career changes or emotional difficulties. A community is any group sharing similarities. Recognize who you are, then find similar people and serve them. That school might benefit from a few volunteer hours or you might have time to tutor or mentor.

Serving the Human Family

 There is no shortage of need within the human family. At the global level, people are starving, are unhoused, and are displaced by wars and economic circumstances. Simple needs can be easily met by the affluence that we enjoy. You or your family or congregation can cooperate to adopt a child or a refugee family. You can donate to programs which educate girls and young women. You can buy poultry for a family half a world away, providing the eggs, sales of the excess eggs for cash, and the hen-house fertilizer for food crops that cannot grow in the weak natural soil.

The needs of the family of humanity are not universally distant. There are people in our own communities who need services to help them with addictions, violence, poverty, hunger and other deprivations. Neighbourhood food banks, youth activity centres and 12-step programs are all places where a small input of energy can have a large impact on community well-being.

Serving Spirit

We live in times when congregations in churches, temples and other places of worship are in decline. There have been societal changes which have left many people without a Spiritual context for their lives.

Using this Six Year’s vibration of Service to enhance your own Spiritual expression is likely to touch our community in a profound way. This is not about old rituals or expressions of dogma. This is about opening ways for everyone to see the presence of the Divine in all things at all times.

You could build a labyrinth in a public place, and allow people to find their own relationship to the path. Hosting interfaith celebrations of thanksgiving, or invocations for peace in our lives can be the best of Service. When people gather in Service they find the commonalities they share, and they can then Serve together for the benefit of all.