Willing to Go Unpaid

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jun 14, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 23.

Willing to Go Unpaid

No ONE is more miserable than the person who always wants to be thanked. It is well to be doing things constantly for others, but such service is tainted and well-nigh ruined by selfishness when it is accompanied by an alert and unhindered quest for gratitude. Nothing destroys the graciousness of our love and our life more surely than our making it evident that we look for thanks. And nothing adds more to the beauty of a service than the entire absence of any desire for thanks.

This is not easily accomplished. The desire for thanks is strong in most of us. Perhaps the devil keeps it there in order to nullify, as much as he can, the effectiveness of our service for others. But we can outdo him, if we will, by resolutely setting ourselves against this destroyer of our highest usefulness.

When we have rendered a genuine service of unselfishness, let us not concern ourselves as to even knowing whether the one for whom we did it is thinking about us at all. We must not try to be thanked; we must not want to be thanked. We must turn squarely away from the whole idea of gratitude-getting — and the best way to do this is to busy ourselves over some new service for some one else. If thanks ever come our way, let us look on this as an undeserved evidence of God’s love, not as payment for value given.—Great Thoughts.