“For it is only in doing, that we learn to do; through service that we learn to serve;” – Volume 5 p.261

I don’t think you need too much imagination to realize that the world today is about promoting self. We have, in fact, a generation called ‘The ME Generation’. These were the Baby Boomers. And if you have a ‘ME generation’ becoming parents and raising children…the generation in which they were raising their children is quite logically going to be called ‘The ME decade’. This was the 1970’s. In the book Salt for Society, W. Phillip Keller describes the ‘70’s as a decade of “pleasure, treasure, and leisure.” Which, of course led to the The Me, Me, Me Millennial generation. So FB feeds the ‘look at me, look at what I did’ need. It is a logical progression.

Could we stop the ME’s in our HomeLearning? Could we learn to say “You”? It’s not about me, but you. Not about what I want, not about what I need, not about what serves me- but serving you.

Charlotte Mason talks frequently about serving, mentioning that one of the reasons for frayed nerves, and tempers, and bad attitudes is a lack of serving. She gives us the antidote in humility which is the absence of looking at self. It is self  un-awareness. And if we look at the world around us, with it’s complete deficit of serving and pushing up others before ourselves, the depressions as we spiral further into ourselves, the addictions as we try to comfort ourselves.

Look outward. Serve.

Who around you needs help?
a neighbour?
a retirement community?
a Sunday school class?
a Grandma?
a local shelter?
the local recycling center?
a mom with a new baby?
a local charity?

“I shall notice, later, the importance of qualifying a girl, by means of definite training, for a particular line of service—for teaching, or nursing, or for general work in a parish, for instance; but in default of such training, as giving her an object in life apart from social success, the mother may do much to make “Ich dien” the motto of her daughter’s life, marking out some special line of helpfulness into which she may throw her youthful energy.” – Volume 5 p.262   [Ich dien = I serve]

“For happiness comes of effort, service, wide interests, and, last and least, of enjoyment; and when people put enjoyment, even of beautiful things, in the first place (and indeed in place of all else), they miss the very thing they seek, and become enfeebled in body and fretful and discontented in temper.” – Volume 4 p.55

“The Family must serve Neighbours.—Again, it is probable that a nation is healthy in proportion as it has its own proper outlets, its colonies and dependencies, which it is ever solicitous to include in the national life. So of the nation in miniature, the family; the struggling families at ‘the back,’ the orphanage, the mission, the necessitous of our acquaintance, are they not for the sustenance of the family in the higher life?” –Volume 2 p.6