With the Feast of Tabernacles coming up so soon, you may have volunteered to serve. Whether you help with ushering, mother’s room, singing in choir, or one of the many other areas, service adds a meaningful dimension to the Holy Days. Last Feast, I was given an amazing opportunity to help out, and I learned a valuable lesson: Serving with others is more rewarding than only serving for others.

For the past several years, I’d sung in festival choir. One year in choir, I met a girl about my age who not only sung with the rest of us, but accompanied one or two of the choir pieces. I guess before that I really hadn’t thought that much about helping out as a pianist at the Feast. At my local congregation I sometimes played hymns, and I’d taken many years of piano lessons. So I decided to volunteer the next year. Amazingly enough, they didn’t have a choir pianist yet, so before long, I was practicing a handful of pieces for the Feast.

Well, as I learned the new songs, it seemed that many of the page turns were strategically placed where my hands most needed to stay on the piano. To fix this, I ended up making myself a very long, spread-out version of the music to play with. It barely balanced on the piano stand. “Do you need a page turner?” my mother asked. “No, I can do it,” I replied. Sure, huh?

One of the first things I wanted to do when my family arrived at the Feast was to try out the piano. It was just being set up, so as soon as it was in place, I tested it. There was no built-in music stand on the electronic keyboard I would be using. One member of the sound crew provided two music stands side-by-side and placed them right against the piano where I could read my long snake-like sheet music. It was a pretty good setup, except that in the somewhat dim light, I could barely make out the notes on the outermost pages, which draped off the edges of the music stands. I just grinned and bore it. But at the next practice, I found one of the music stands missing. It was needed elsewhere. Now what? This is when panic set in. I couldn’t do this myself. “Do you need a page turner?” my mother asked again. “Okay, yes,” I said, swallowing my pride. It was actually a relief to admit that I needed help.

It’s totally okay to ask for help. In fact, it’s not just okay, it’s biblical. Take Proverbs 27:17, for instance: “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend.” We are also taught to “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).

Well, there was this one girl who really wanted to join choir, but she was still young enough to sing with the children. She wasn’t in adult choir that year. Being a page turner was an opportunity for her to participate. At first when I met her, it was kind of awkward to know what to say or do. And as I talked to her, I learned that she wasn’t comfortable with reading music, though she was good at singing. However, she was a great help and learned quickly. It took us several rounds of practicing to get a good system going, but we eventually worked well together. She would follow along with the words and hold the page, ready to turn it as we neared the end. I would nod slightly before I needed it flipped.

Come to think of it, this all reminds me very much of an incident from Moses’ life. The Israelites were fighting a battle, and it was soon discovered that whenever Moses held up his hands, the Israelites prevailed, and when his hands dropped, their enemies succeeded. Moses was getting weary, and there was just no way he could continue to hold his hands up for hours. We come to Exodus 17:12, which says: “But Moses’ hands became heavy; so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it. And Aaron and Hur supported his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.” Our friends are part of our strength!

Even more importantly, the real source of strength isn’t really human. Psalm 28:7-8 points out: “The Lord is my strength and my shield,” and, “The Lord is their strength.” I should have kept that in mind all along.

Serving others is great, but I’ve learned that serving with others benefits even more people. The girl I learned to work with wouldn’t have had a part in choir that year if I had insisted on working without a page turner. And as a side benefit, it helped me to get along with others better. This is not to say that we shouldn’t ever get a job done by ourselves—it’s just that at times it’s better to get others involved. So as you serve at the Feast this year, look for ways to work for and with others.