service as play

There is a lot of practice for me in this one tiny sentence.

Service can be play.

Sometimes acts of service can feel heavy for me especially when it involves cleaning or tasks that I've decided in my head are “for other people to do".

For example, my mind can quickly jump to “Why would any one leave all this garbage on a park picnic bench. They should clean up after themselves!”… and then continue on my walk not wanting to get my hands dirty both physically and metaphorically.

Instead, there is likely an innocent reason the garbage is there. Perhaps the wind played some tricks and blew it out of its container on garbage day and up onto the bench… or a group of kids who are still learning to clean up after themselves naively left it… or a family had a screaming baby to deal with and departed in a panic.

Whatever the reason, this situation is actually a beautiful gift.

It's an opportunity to serve nature, the community and ourselves.

And we can make it a game. We could pick up only blue pieces of garbage (maybe even enlisting others in the game so each person can pick up a different colour, including black and white)… or count the number of pieces of plastic garbage in comparison to other materials… or sing a song to yourself while you pick things up.

No matter which game you try, let's each pick up 10 pieces of trash this week. If we do this as a group, together we'll put thousands of pieces of trash in the bin.

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Which game did you choose? Share in the comments below so we can all learn and play together.