Serving > Ben n Jerrys

Today was one of "those days." Today I uttered the following phrases to my toddler: "Are you really eating a bowl of gravy?" and "Oh no you have burrs in your face" among other winning phrases that could be found should my day had an official transcriber. How annoying would that be? I am more exhausted than I could imagine being and I am waiting up for my Husband because he had some rough meetings today and I want to see how that went and share a cranberry cookie with him. Important note: By share I meant we each get our own but we will both be eating one.

Moving on. Even though my day was sort of a ball of lint stuck with burrs and covered in gravy, I am really pleased with it. Allow me to explain. Today I got the chance to stand up again and throw a few punches at life. For weeks I have felt like the pile of goo in the corner of every room but today some rough things happened in our family and I contributed to being the backbone. This comes as a shock to me because yesterday was one of the worst greiving days yet, depression settled in like a fog and the forecast seemed less than bright.

But, today I remembered a very important truth: Serving other people and being Jesus to them lifts you up out of your own funk. This is good advice, seriously write this down, because when you step up to meet someone elses needs you stop thinking about your own. You put yourself in someone elses shoes and think of ways to make their life better and stop focusing on how bad yours is (eve if it is!). Being selfless gives depression a good slap to the face, we wake up and go: "Huh, I'm going through something awful, but so are other people."

I know somewhere, way back in the dusty parts of my brain where I keep all things learned my college philosophy class, I remember someone very negative and crabby saying that you can't do anything selfless. This school of thought asserts that when you serve others, you feel good and hence benefit from it. Your positive result takes away the selflessness of the act. I guess to that guy (who in my head looks exactly like mike meyers from the SNL sprockets sketches) I would say that even if you go to a soup kitchen to serve pull yourself out of depression, so what? There were far easier options if I was the only focus of my actions. Such as eat an entire pint of Ben and Jerrys white watching an entire season of Project Runway. As I have heard some may be known to do...

God has us wired in all sorts of cool ways, but I think one of the coolest is the desire to forget about yourself that leads to serving someone, which in turn results in feeling lighter and brighter in your own heart. If I were more scientifically inclined I would make that into an eqation... somehow.