Daily Habits

I have always thought it interesting the impact friends have in our lives. In many ways, aren’t our interests and decisions influenced by those we associate with? Towards the end of September I received an email that really got me thinking:

“My health and wellness class is going alright…We have behavior change contracts that we made up. Basically you pick one thing in your life you feel you could improve and work on it every day. I chose service and my contract is to do at least one act of service every day. So today, I made all of my roommates' beds while they were away and we left them little sticky notes wishing them a great day. It was cool, I'm going to have to start getting creative though ;) haha” -- I made that my goal as well.

   

           This was never intended to be a blog post, but I remembered a general conference talk given about recording experiences in your journal. A quotation from this talk was written on the front of my journal all through my mission: “I heard in my mind these words: ‘I’m not giving you these experiences for yourself. Write them down’ …And so I wrote it down, so that my children could have the memory someday when they would need it.” (Henry B. Eyring 2007)

Most of my acts of service weren’t some amazing, life changing act that would alter the course of someone’s life, but rather a matter of patterning my daily habits after our Savior’s example. Sometimes my act of service was just helping a woman carry a heavy bag up a flight of stairs, or helping a friend move rooms here in the dorms. Once it was simply playing cards with a lonely classmate. A couple of experiences particularly stand out:

It was late one evening and I watched as a middle aged woman got on the bus. She looked as if it had been a long day, and I could tell she was exhausted. When I stood up and offered her my seat, she looked surprised and tried to insist that she was fine standing. The argument ended abruptly though, as I blurted out: “My dad would beat me if he knew I didn’t give you my seat.” She chuckled softly to herself before accepting my offer. I wish I could put into words the way I felt as I saw her gentle smile and heard her words of gratitude. Standing by the door waiting for my stop, I couldn’t help but think: “God, it isn’t fair. How is it that whenever I try to serve someone, I always feel like I received more than I gave?”

Coming back from an afternoon jog I saw a rather disgruntled woman struggling to communicate with Chinese workers at the front desk. My friends Lauren and Tina were trying to help out, but were obviously having communication difficulties, so I went to see if I could help. As it turned out, the woman was Indonesian, and there was confusion about her and her son checking out of the dorms. The Indonesian lady spoke no Chinese and only limited English, but we could communicate enough for me to understand her concern. With some effort of translating between them, everything was straightened out and the Indonesian woman was on her way to the airport with little time to spare.

I think my favorite acts of service though, are those that go by unnoticed. Often they aren’t large acts of service; maybe it was just unclogging a sink in the hall bathroom. (Someone had used paper towels to block the drain and water was spilling out all over the floor.) Another time, I was writing an email to a friend and heard the repeated banging’s of a washing machine down the hall which had tipped over, spraying water everywhere. Trying not to get soaked while unplugging the machine was quite the ordeal, but it felt good knowing that I could make a difference in the world, even if only in a small way.