Faith & formation

No Alarm Sounds When Usefulness Becomes Identity

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  5 min read

The dangerous thing about this particular drift is that every stage of it looks like faithfulness.

There is no alarm that sounds when a man stops serving God and starts being his service.

Nobody schedules the change. There is no Tuesday on which somebody decides that what they do will now be what they are. It accumulates — and it accumulates through good events, which is what makes it nearly impossible to catch from inside.

How the substitution happens

You are good at something the community needs. So you are asked again. Being asked feels like being valued, because it largely is.

Over years, the asking becomes the main channel through which you experience your own worth. Not because you are vain — because it is the channel that reports back. Prayer does not send you a thank-you note. A completed rota does.

And then the substitution is quietly complete: your sense of standing — with the community, and with God — is resting on your usefulness, and nobody involved has done anything wrong.

The tests that reveal it

Because it is invisible from inside, it can usually only be seen when something interrupts the usefulness. Three ordinary events do it:

• Being replaced. Somebody else does your thing, and does it well. If the dominant feeling is threat rather than relief, the role was carrying more than a task.
• Being unable. Illness, injury, a season with no capacity. A person whose standing rests on service experiences this not as rest but as falling.
• Being unthanked. The work is done and nobody notices. If that produces something disproportionate to the size of the slight, the work was doing a second job.

What is actually required, which is smaller and harder

The correction here is not to serve less. That is the obvious move and it is usually wrong — it removes the symptom and leaves the mechanism, and the person simply becomes useless and equally unknown.

The requirement is the old one: act justly, love mercy, walk humbly. Notice what is not in it. There is no volume in it, no scale, nothing that could be reported at an annual meeting.

It is a description of how a person moves, not of how much they produce. Which means it is available on a day when you have accomplished nothing at all — and that availability is the whole point, because a standing that survives your worst month is the only kind worth having.