Sacrifice, Service, and Love

I love the process of perfection, despite it's being painful at times. I'm grateful for room for improvement. I enjoy always having something to work on or to work towards. What a blessing it is to have Heavenly Father direct your attention to those things that you most need to change. It is humbling, but that's the whole point! I rely more on Him because even as I become increasingly like Christ I can also see more clearly how totally human and frail I am. One of the reasons I will always need to rely on God is my narrow perspective and short-sightedness. I must have the help of an all-seeing, all-knowing God. How else can I feel confidence that I am where I should be and doing what I ought to be doing?

I have been learning about Sacrifice, Service, and Love and the ways in which they are all interrelated. I live a very self-centered life; I have always struggled with selfishness. My focus of improvement right now is service, because Heavenly Father has opened my eyes to see how this can help me not only with that weakness, but also with pride and being judgmental.

It's a beautiful thing: as you serve, you lose yourself. You stop worrying about all the silly little things surrounding you and your life, and you start concerning yourself more and more with the well-being of others. I heard a return missionary say in his home-coming talk recently that this brings you into a different dimension of life. It's true so far as I've experienced it. Giving service, when done in the right attitude, changes your perspective and paradigms. It changes you. It's more than doing projects every month. It's about becoming a compassionate and loving human being.

So far it has drastically changed the way I think about people. It has changed my feelings toward them and in consequence changed my actions towards them. My mind has become open to the possibilities that await when you change from a self-centered being to a love-centered being. We have promised to give our all to the gospel and to the kingdom. When we take that from the hypothetical world into the real one, and really start to consider what we have to offer to others and to the church, it changes everything.