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honestly in service actually relies on me knowing what my motives for serving actually are. when i was in the midst of defining myself by service to the fellowship, i was clueless about why i served and i became more than a bit overzealous in defending the faith, as it were. i fondly refer to those days as my Torquemada period of recovery. i am certainly grateful that my actions did not do any permanent damage to my fellowship and that there was some good that came out of my actions. i know now that i was among the sickest in those rooms and often the loudest and most disruptive when consensus was being generated. the greatest amends i made to my fellowship was to step away, achieve a stature of equality with my peers and quietly offer my opinions to the mix. after years of practicing “felonious service,” i am quite capable of being part of the solution, rather than part of the problem and seek to unify, rather than impose my self-will when serving my peers.
this change in behavior and its subsequent effect on my identity and my self-esteem is evidence of the old adage of behaving my way to better thinking. the more i let go of “knowing” the correct path for my fellowship to take, the healthier my local fellowship and i become. there are more than a few trends occurring in my local service structure that are a bit disturbing to me, but this white knight is not coming to the rescue of the mythical damsel in distress. i believe that the current set of trusted servants will work out the latest “kinks” with self-will run riot and the service bodies will emerge stronger and more unified than before.
as i sat this morning and the “sins” of my past bubbled up to the surface, what i was most struck by was that i no longer required the sort of validation to feel whole, any more. i can serve without fanfare and acclaim and be more than okay. i can communicate honestly about where i see the service body going and express my reservations, when i think it is stepping out in the wrong direction. after the fiasco of my last failure to yield to group conscience that was railroaded by self-will, i see it is not my job or task to keep a service body on the straight and narrow, as that is beyond my power and the scope of what i do, as a member. what is wrong, is still wrong, my job is to say so, express why i think it is wrong and let it go. bad ideas will collapse under their own weight of rationalizations and justifications no matter how “slick” the presenter may be. my place is to have faith in the group conscience process and see what happens, just for today.

∞ DT ∞