FW: The Intenders Bridge - Reminder #75 - Serve Others

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The Bridge ~ Reminder #75

The Seventh Intent

Serve Others

I practice love in action. I always have enough

to spare and enough to share. I am available to help those who need it. I

serve others.

As we shift into the new paradigm and move away from an attitude of

service-to-self to one of service-to-others, we'll each, in our own way, come

to a point when we realize that service to others is service to oneself. This

usually happens when we get a glimpse of what our world would be like if

everyone was serving everyone else. It's easy to see that we would all be much

happier, more abundant, and less fearful if we were all serving each other.

War, poverty, unrest, starvation, and the like wouldn't exist because we

wouldn't allow our brothers and sisters to suffer like we do nowadays. We'd be

helping them instead.

An Intenders Story

When I first decided to serve

others, I didn't realize that it also included forgiving them. I thought I

would help them out by cleaning or running errands or doing whatever they

wanted, but what I came to understand was that I could help them in other ways

as well.

The instance that brought all of this home to me was when I made an intention

to help my aging mother. In 1998, I gave up my own apartment, moved in with my

mom, and began to prepare her food, bathe her, and do all of the things

necessary to make her last days as comfortable as possible. Up until then, I

really hadn't made much of an effort to get close to her. She lived 3 states

away, and we really didn't get along all that well anyway. In truth, there were

long periods of time when we never spoke at all because I was still carrying a

lot of anger toward her for things she'd done to me as a child. Mainly, I never

understood how she could just stand by and let my father abuse me like he did.

But in the last few weeks of her life, as she lay in her deathbed with me

sitting in the chair beside her, we began to talk about some of the things that

we might not have otherwise spoken about. One particular evening after we

finished eating and our barriers were lower than usual, I asked her why she let

my dad beat me without ever coming to my rescue. Her answer showed me a side of

her I never knew existed.

She explained that she was just as afraid of him as I was, that he beat her and

threatened her too, and that he was always very careful not to let anyone else

know about it. She was so sorry, she said, but at the time she was totally

incapable of giving me the love I needed because she was in fear for her own

safety.

She started to cry when she told me the details. I felt such compassion for

her, laying there in her bed like that, waiting to die any day. But, most of

all, I felt sorry because we'd never talked like this before. When her tears

stopped, and as I was wiping them from her cheeks, she touched my arm with her

frail hand and asked me to forgive her for not being a good mother. She said

she really loved me, both then and now, and that it would mean a lot to her if

I could find forgiveness in my heart for her.

I didn't move except to brush away the tears from my own eyes. Suddenly, a very

emotional experience when I was a teenager came to mind. My mother was in a bad

mood and had punished me for something I was innocent of. It was in that moment

that I had decided, resolutely, to put her out of my life. Now, however, as I

recalled that highly-charged event, I was able to see the unhappiness in her

face that I didn't see before. I never knew she was that

unhappy.

As my vision of the past receded, she looked up at me from her bed, our eyes

met, and I told her that I forgave her, not just for that instance, but for

everything uncaring she'd ever done to me. Then I leaned down to hug her, and

as I did, it felt like a great weight was lifted from my chest. We both wept

some more that night, and, after that, something shifted in me . . . and in

her. From then on, until the time she passed away, she was much calmer and at

peace. The way I see it, our forgiveness healed us both.

Alan Matousek

Birmingham, AL

From The Code ~

Intentions in Action

My intention for today is:

I intend that I'm available to help others and that I always have

enough to spare and enough to share.