How Families Serve Each Other

When I first began to lead marriage and family workshops, we used a Friday night to Saturday format. I would ask couples to bring a sack lunch on Saturdays. I would often ask, at the end of the Friday night session, “Who would like to bring me a lunch tomorrow?” Immediately three or four hands shot up.

Why do these people freely and spontaneously volunteer to bring a lunch to a stranger? Chances are they learned the attitude of service as children. They are eager to serve, and they find satisfaction in helping others. In a loving family, this attitude of service will permeate the entire family. Family members will serve each other, and they will serve beyond the family structure.

Cultural critic and bestselling author Bill Bennett lists “work” as one of the top ten virtues.1  And the Bible is full of teachings and examples of diligence and effort—the book of Proverbs alone has dozens of verses addressing work (and laziness). Most historians agree that Western culture was built on the work ethic. Work is defined as physical and mental exertion toward the accomplishment of some worthy goal. And work starts in the home.

Can Somebody Take Out the Trash?

In the family, much work needs to be done. Clothes must be washed, folded, and perhaps ironed. Beds need to be made, food has to be prepared or purchased and served (does anyone still cook?). There is trash to be stashed, floors to be vacuumed or swept or mopped. Cars need oil changes, bills have to be paid, clutter cleaned up, pets cared for. Even with today’s smaller yards, someone still needs to mow the lawn, run the leaf blower, or trim the bushes.

The list goes on. The work never seems to end. We may not have as much work today as in the frontier days, and many people hire help, but there’s still plenty of work to go around. With most husbands and more than 50 percent of wives working outside the home, parents have limited time to get it all done.

Who will do the work? Hopefully, the family—all the family. In any sized family, there is enough work to go around.

A healthy family has an attitude of service to each other.

If work is such a fundamental virtue, then every family member should certainly learn to work. Some busy families neglect this responsibility, thinking it’s more important for the kids to pursue activities like sports than it is for them to do chores. Or, the parents reason, “It’s easier to do it myself.” But we aren’t doing our children any favors by letting them off the hook. We can delegate age-appropriate jobs, along with basic training on how to do the job. When our son, Derek, got to the lawn-mowing stage (which, incidentally, is my favorite stage of childrearing), he always wanted to mow back and forth. For years, I had mowed the grass in squares, starting at the outside and working my way to the middle, which left the trimmings in a nice tiny square in the middle of the yard—easy to bag. I explained my efficient strategy to Derek, but it never took. He developed a different philosophy—scatter the trimmings, and you don’t have to bag. His back-and-forth pattern left light trimmings across the lawn that in twenty-four hours were hardly visible. I wrestled, trying to decide what was more important: my perfectionistic, efficient method or his creativity—his individuality. I opted for the latter. I refused to make him a robot or a clone, and that’s hard for a perfectionistic parent.

Perhaps you are thinking, So there is work to be done, and every family member needs to share the load. What’s new? “An attitude of service” is far more than simply getting the work done. In a healthy family, members have the sense that as I do something for the benefit of other family members, I am doing something genuinely good. Individuals have an internal desire to serve and an emotional sense of satisfaction with a job done for others. In a highly functional family, there develops the sense that service to others is one of life’s highest callings.

A healthy family has an attitude of service to each other and to the world outside the walls of the family. Read the biographies of men and women who have lived lives of sacrificial service to others, and you will find that most of them grew up in families that nurtured the idea of service as virtuous.

Kids Who Want to Help, Teens Who Want to Serve

An attitude of service is relatively easy to foster in the emerging child. As a baby becomes a toddler, she becomes a full-time explorer. In time, the explorer becomes a builder, and by the time the child is four, the builder has become a helper. The idea of service seems almost innate. If the child is allowed to help and affirmed for helping, he or she will likely be a willing worker well into the first and second grade. In grades three through six, a child’s attitude of service will be greatly influenced by the models in the family. If the parents have talked about service as a virtue and have helped the child discover ways to serve family members, and if the child is given verbal affirmation for such acts of service, the child will continue to find satisfaction in serving well into adolescence.

In the wonderful years of thirteen to eighteen, there will be dramatic changes. If the teenager has internalized an attitude of service, he or she will reach out in many ways beyond the family circle. At school and perhaps at church, such teenagers will tend to be servant leaders. They will spend considerable time helping others achieve. But they may not be as eager to serve at home. They will likely spend more and more time away from the family and may even show resistance to family activities.

They are experiencing another of life’s great urges—the urge to be free. The whole point is to put distance between the parents and the teen, space to grow toward independence. Doors to their rooms will be closed rather than open (actually a wonderful idea to a perfectionist parent). They are getting involved in activities away from home. The opinion of friends may be more important than the opinion of parents.

All of this distance and reluctance to continue in the service mode at home often creates conflicts in the family. But conflicts are not symptoms of disease; how we deal with conflicts will reveal the health of the family. In a loving family, conflicts are expected. We recognize that people do not always think and feel the same way. Certainly, parents and teens will not see the world out of the same eyes. Thus, we should not be surprised when conflict arises. Healthy families learn how to process conflicts. Rather than avoiding the issues, we seek to put the issues on the table. Teens are encouraged to give their point of view while the parents listen. Parents genuinely seek to understand what the teen is feeling as well as what the teen is saying. Conversely, the teen listens to the parents’ viewpoint with understanding ears. (Does this really happen in some families? Yes. It happens where there is a high level of security in the family.)

Contrary to some current thinking, teens really do want limits. “Is there anyone who stands for anything anymore?” a fifteen-year-old young man asked. “Everyone seems to accept anything, given the right situation. I wish adults gave us more guidance. Haven’t they learned something during their life that would help us avoid some potholes?” Limits create boundaries, and boundaries give feelings of security. Security creates an atmosphere where teens can learn and grow. Thus, when the teen hits the stage of freedom seeking and may begin to forget the serving role in the family, parents must respect his or her desire to be independent but remind the teen that people are always interdependent and that serving others is a necessary part not only of family life but of all life.

Adults and youth alike are attracted to the young man or woman who goes out of his or her way to serve others.

Adults and youth alike are attracted to the young man or woman who goes out of his or her way to serve others. A number of years ago when I was directing the college outreach ministry of our church, I encountered four young men who attended the University of North Carolina. They had secured summer jobs in our city and had begun attending some of our activities for college students. I later discovered that they were all living in one small apartment with a view to save as much money as possible during the summer. They had been attending activities only a couple of weeks when all four of them approached me and one of their more verbal members told me that they had decided to “plug into” our church for the summer and they wanted to offer their services. They would be happy to serve in any capacity I might suggest. Assuming that they were like many college students in those days, always thinking about the résumé, I thought they were volunteering for leadership positions in our summer programs. After all, “Volunteer Director” of the Building Bridges to Youth program would certainly impress a future employer.

I expressed appreciation for their volunteer spirit but informed them that we had to plan our summer programs in the winter and that all of our places of volunteer leadership were already assigned. Their friendly spokesman quickly responded, “No, no. We’re not interested in leadership positions; we’re talking about service.”

“Can you give me some examples of what you have in mind?” I inquired.

Without hesitation, he said, “We were thinking that perhaps you could use someone to wash the dishes after the Wednesday evening meal or perhaps clean the ovens or mop the floors. Anything,” he said. “We just want to serve.”

“Oh, well, in that case,” I said, “I think we have plenty of openings.” Throughout that summer not only did they wash dishes, clean ovens, and mop floors, but they also washed buses, trimmed grass, and cleaned bathrooms. The people who were active in our church that summer have never forgotten “the boys from Carolina.” In fact, their “attitude of service” affected the whole direction of our college ministry from that summer forward.

Not all service will be directed toward persons. For example, many young people love helping animals. Elizabeth, a junior high student, told me of her passion for helping troubled animals. I found her by a community lake putting a splint on a duck’s leg. The duck had been hit by a passing car, and Elizabeth came to the rescue. All of us are impressed and encouraged by young people who “adopt” a section of highway or become involved in efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa. Such young people typically learned their attitude of service in the home.

How Adults Serve

The independence of adulthood is often the soil out of which genuine service to others grows. Adults choose to have children, knowing that such a choice means twenty-four months of diapers, five years of bathing, two years of nursing or bottle-feeding, spoon-feeding, putting on 308 Band-Aids (with some kids, at least that many each year), attending a minimum of 220 ball games, cooking countless meals, sacrificing to pay college tuition, and a thousand other acts of service. Yet we choose—freely choose—children. And some couples often choose to adopt a child whom someone else is unable to serve.

True greatness is expressed in serving, not in dominating.

Service to others is the highest pinnacle humanity ever scales. Most people who have studied His life closely agree that Jesus Christ stood on the pinnacle of greatness when He took a washbasin and towel and performed a lowly act of washing His disciples’ feet. He removed all doubt as to His intent when He said, “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. . . . Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them” (John 13:14–15, 17).  On another occasion, He told His followers that “whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant” (Matthew 20:26).

It’s a great paradox—the way up is down. True greatness is expressed in serving, not in dominating. No parents challenge their children to be like Hitler, while thousands continue to challenge their children to be like Jesus. Service is a mark of greatness. In a healthy family, this attitude of the value of helping others serves as the oil that lubricates the wheels of family life. Without it, the wheels run down, and family life stalls. With it, a family flourishes.