Service

Service is what my life is about.

Service has always been important to me personally and is something that I have tried very hard to enjoy since it is a big part of life. Service can be good for the one doing it as well as the one receiving it, if done with the right motivations and in the right way.

My job is also about service. I am a public servant. My job exists by and for the citizens and taxpayers. This is one reason that wherever I work, it will be to the needs of the service and not necesarily my own needs.

Whenever we serve with the proper spirit and motivation it is like that. Often our service for others involves a degree of sacrifice of our own self interest. When King Benjamin served his people he supported himself while sacrificing his own time and interests for the public good. He was able to do amazing things because he understood that service also means sacrifice of self for the common good.

When we serve in the Church we also can learn this lesson of service and sacrifice. A call to serve is a call to give up our own selfish interests for the good of others and a cause we believe in. It is not quite as important what we are called to do at church, or where I am called to serve at work, but it is important to do my best and understand what it means to serve.

Service is not about me. It's about something greater than me and for others who deserve to be served as my equals. If I have been blessed with skills or resources I should use them.

I have been thinking about these things today because today I was called to serve with my wife as a member of the "Temple Committee" and this week I turned in the list indicating my preferences on where I am sent to serve and doing what in my job, with the understanding that I can go anywhere AND I played tennis yesterday for the first time in years, which also includes a lot of "service!" :)

I will try to remember that I am a servant and to work my best while keeping a positive attitude to make a difference for good in the world and for the people I serve.

Memory

This was a great week.

It was fun, hard, boring, exciting, stressful, eye-opening, disappointing, satisfying, tiring, amazing, surprising, difficult. It was a little microcosm of life itself in a way. There was so much to it.

I memorized passwords and numbers and rules. I had experiences I won't forget, like the Secretary visiting our orientation class, and others I am trying to remember, like the presentation on the structure of the department.

Life is like this week. There are so many experiences. Some of what we experience we must remember, some would be nice to remember, and some we will remember without even trying. It's so fascinating.

I wish I could automatically turn my memory on or off. That way I could remember things I want to remember and forget things I don't want to remember or don't have any use for any more.

This week there are some things I need to remember and some things I will never forget.

Settling in?

This week I solidified a few of the streets in my mind, found some other places that we needed to find, got the youngest in pre-school, and met a few other people. These are all good and important things right now. One of the people in charge of helping with foreign service officer careers and making our assignments told us that one of the most essential things we will do is get to know the people in our incoming group or "class." We will be helping each other out in many ways throughout our careers including putting in a good word for a position we might want, warning us of places we might want to be wary of, gaining perspective, etc. Part of that is getting to know one another. I have been able to meet and interact with a few already and there have been some opportunities to meet others. There are almost 100 in my incoming class and so there are a lot of people to remember, but I'm up to the task. I specifically remember about 13 of the names and faces at the moment and there are several others that I'll have to think more about to come up with at the moment. I have studied maps of the area this week, studied Russian, unpacked the air baggage which arrived on Friday, ate at a great Lebanese place with my wife for lunch, got my son enrolled in a Baptist pre-school, met a few people who are not new to the Foreign Service who live here, helped my wife to learn a few of the routes to important places, went to a temple session at the DC temple (and got myself there and back), set up a new bank account that will work well overseas or wherever I am, almost set up insurance on the car and our belongings that will also work with our new lifestyle, endured a couple of days of rain, visited the zoo and saw pandas and other animals, ushered at our stake conference, went to a house in the northern virginia countryside and rode on a zip line and roasted marshmallows on a bonfire. It has been fun and packed, but I am also a little bored of not working and ready to start. This paragraph is way to long and breaks all rules of good writing, but feels a bit like this week. I am ready to start my new career tomorrow and very excited.

This week - Staging

In my last job I was introduced to terms that before that time were unfamiliar to me: staging server and production server. Colleagues talked about them with ease while I wondered which was which and what their purpose was. I knew they were where our new Web site project was stored electronically, but I couldn't remember the difference until one day when I was thinking about a musical and it clicked. Maybe everyone else knows this, but "staging" for the server where you put everything to check it out and make sure it works how you want it to, sort of like practice and dress rehearsals, and "production" for the server where the actual thing is running--it's the show, the real thing.

On every successful journey or hike or project there is some part of it that is staging and then some part is production. I have been in staging for my new career for a while and am about a week away from production. Because my new career also includes a lifestyle change for our whole family, this week has meant a lot of getting things ready for everyone--staging.

We registered the children on-line, visited the schools, talked to administrators and teachers, filled out more "paper-work", figured out how to drive there, found out which buses go and from where at what time, shopped for school supplies after finding where to get them. We found the grocery store and bought food, found the church building, figured out the shuttle, figured out the metro and how to purchase fares, and all kinds of other things.

We also did some fun things like visit Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial one day, visit Smithsonian Air and Space Museum another day and went swimming a couple of other days. I kind of put these in the same category since we are figuring out where to learn about what we can do and how to get there.

We're learning a lot about the area and ourselves in the process. Hopefully we'll work out any "bugs" before we launch (in stages) this week and next so things can run as smoothly as possible and we can take care of new issues as they arise after that. I'm sure I'll have more "staging" to come, but it's always a learning process and can be just as difficult as the actual "production."