Photo Thanks by London Scout

One of the things I’m proud of with how I spend my time is that I don’t go two days without assisting others with some thing that they’re doing. I help people. I find value in this. I find life in this.

I don’t need to be needed. I never have. I’m actually a little too crass and introverted for that. I’m a little to “off to myself” for that. But I love to help. It’s one of the thirty things I want to do from that assignment Dr. Hodge gave me a couple years ago. A lot of people need boundaries when they love to help. The focus of my post is on the love.

I’ve told my wife in the last few years that I know more about saying yes and no based upon my self-understanding. A part of my self-understanding is that I’m around in order to assist others in directly and regularly contributing to the world. In other words, my contribution is in my ensuring that others are contributing. I find that there is a gift in helping others. I don’t mean the hallmark version. I mean that there is a grace, an immeasurable one, an inscrutable grace in helping others.

You can’t put your finger on it or slice it or quantify it. But it’s one of those soul deposits that you feel. You know that connecting another person to their something big makes you bigger.

Are you helping somebody else achieve something that’s important to them? If you can’t find a time in the last month when you genuinely helped another person pull something off, meet a goal, live better, answer a question: what exactly are you living for?

Look at that question. Sit with it. Turn it over. Inspect it. What are you living for? I think most of us don’t even hear the question much less offer an answer. Do you know what you’re about? Do you know why you’re alive? Do you know the places where your grace comes from?