My Reflection on My Service Hours

     This post is a little different than most from this blog. It covers a topic more personal: my own reflection on my community service I performed for school. Although it is not the same as other posts on this blog, its relevance to learning about holiness still remains.

     I went to the Houston food bank for all 15 of my community service hours, and though the work I did there was helpful to society as a whole, I don't necessarily think that it caused me to grow in holiness. As is true with all things in Catholicism, the actions we perform need to have a heart behind them. Reconciliation's effects are lessened if our disposition is wrong. Likewise, with the service hours I performed I did not perform them in order to achieve some greater goal of holiness; I did them to accomplish the task my school had required me to do. This, I fear, is the risk that schools like Strake Jesuit run when requiring service hours to be performed. Although the service is valuable to the community as a whole, the individual who performs said hours does not necessarily grow as a person.

     I don't think there really is a way to force a person to grow in Holiness. I think that providing opportunities such as these service hours can be beneficial, and might help influence a person to make the decision to grow. The nature by which grace is distributed by the Church lends evidence to the fact that The Church acknowledges that a person must come to accept grace, grace does not just find them. They must perform the sacraments, they cannot just acknowledge the sacraments. So what my community service has taught me is that it is necessary to do these things by my own will, not to fulfill another person's goals.