In recent times the service sector of the business world has grown more rapidly than any other job area. Broadly understood, this occupational term includes all the activities that are directed toward meeting individual needs and desires—-from financial services to family planning, from landscaping to creating diets. It includes vocational trainers, legal advisors, marriage counselors, health therapists, tax consultants, computer programmers, travel agents-—whoever provides information and skills to individual or group clients, not only serving their needs but identifying needs they never knew they had.

  Driven though it be by market values, the Luciferic lures of advertising, and runaway consumerism, the explosion of the service industry in part reflects the approach of the Aquarian era, one of whose keynotes is service.

  For students of Rosicrucian Christianity, service constitutes another kind of vocation-—a spiritual calling whose refusal results in the experience of a soul poverty that no material affluence can alleviate. The call is, “Follow me.” The caller is Christ and the calling is to serve the Archangelic Servant of humanity in whatever way our talents and destiny determine and the Holy Spirit directs.

  We certainly do not lack for things to do, nor people (and animals and plants and earth) to serve, for a friend of Christ is like Him the servant of all. Lest the term offend one’s sense of dignity, we recall that even Christ declined the term master and referred the deference and obedience implied in that title to God. Can serving God give offense? Is it not rather a privilege and a joy?

  Sincere service is not motivated by and does not expect reward or recognition, for we fulfill our deepest individual needs when we direct our helpful energies toward any part of this planet. Inasmuch as we serve any, even the least, in God’s creation, we serve God.

  We adopt a low profile, for we pursue a high calling. But the servant is not servile, for servility harbors resentment based on smarting pride. Unable to be genuinely humble, it fawns humility so that it may receive recognition and gratuities.

  The Christian server is vigilant to prevent service gaining the upper hand and displacing the one thing needful. Both inordinate care about our mundane duties and undue concern for our spiritual well-being undermine our primary purpose, which is to ever identify with the word and Person of Christ.

  Let us be attentive to what is being done for us even as we do for others. We realize that it is not our doing, in itself, which has value, but what we do for and in Christ. Fidelity to service can easily become Christ’s greatest competitor and the righteousness of our acts divert us from Him Who is Righteousness itself. Our service may be self-forgetting, but let it not be mindless, else we may find ourselves more devoted to service and self-serving than we are to Christ.