The best thing I have done

since I finished MY is to sponsor a child through Compassion International . My sister-in-law sponsors a child, and she sent out an email about a different child who needed a sponsor, but by the time I made the decision to do something, he had already found sponsor (my sister-in-law's parents, who were apparently VERY excited about it!) So I am sponsoring a four-year-old Guatemalan girl instead.

Let me tell you that this is not only the best thing I have done, but probably the thing that has made me the happiest. (And my sister-in-law's parents seem pretty happy about it, too, so perhaps you should look into it.) I'm not telling you this to praise myself, but because I want you to know how much good it has done for me (I obviously don’t have purely altruistic motives here).

When I lived in Oakland, my “job” was to serve others. The generosity of my sponsors allowed me to spend the majority of my time washing homeless feet and helping first graders with math. And I didn’t always love it, but it usually made me feel useful and appreciated, even if I didn’t always feel like I was doing any good (but that’s another post).

And now, for the first time in my life, I have a job that pays me real money (read: above minimum wage). I don’t yet have a church family or friends in the area who I hang out with on a regular basis, so all I’ve really got is Food TV and my job. And let me say that my job does not make me feel all that useful. (And neither does Food TV, because cooking any of those recipes means that I have to eat the same stuff for a week just to finish off leftovers.)

I want to find a place to volunteer (and think I’m getting a lot closer), but where I volunteer depends largely on where I end up attending church. For instance, if I decide to attend the suburban church reaching out to its urban neighborhood, then I want to volunteer somewhere in the inner city. But if I decide to attend an inner-city church, I might want to volunteer somewhere else, like a children’s home. (I want some variety while staying in touch with my roots.) And as some of you know, the search for a church has been a long and largely painful one so far.

I suppose there are other ways of feeling useful than to volunteer somewhere, but volunteering is my first choice. Grandma Ruth used to say something at camp every year about how everyone needs something to do, someone to love. . .and something else that I don’t remember (obviously I was spending that time contemplating Bonfire dates). That said, I think it is possible to feel useful if you have children to take care of or other people who need you to function, and those are worthwhile endeavors as well. However, I don’t plan on taking on that sort of responsibility any time soon, so I’m pretty much left with volunteering, which, as I mentioned before, is fine with me.

I think the MY staff lied to us when they led us to believe that the work we were doing couldn’t be fun (or at least wasn’t worth as much if it was). It wasn’t always fun, I admit, sometimes because it was hard, sometimes because we were dealing with other unrelated issues (roommates, family drama, roommate drama, etc.), sometimes because it was such a 24-7 endeavor. (MY was when I decided that I wanted an 8-5 job that I could come home from at the end of each day.) Instead, they tried to sell us on “joy,” which is apparently much more holy. Apparently joy is what you get when you are doing a job you dislike not for the fun of it, but because it’s the right thing to do. I disagree. Besides, I think there’s enough of that in my personal life to meet my joy-quota anyway. (And now that I think about it, I must’ve exceeded the joy-quota for my lifetime just in my year of MY.) I think serving others can be fun. It doesn’t HAVE to be fun, but it can be. Which is good, because I am now a great proponent of fun, especially since I lived through a year of fun-less MY.

So I am looking for some kind of service that fulfills me and meets the needs of others. (Did anyone else notice that I put my needs first? Hah. Figures.) Currently I am looking into serving at a clinic for low-income service workers who are employed in the rich part of town. If this all works out, I’ll get to talk with them as they come in and pray with them before they see a doctor. Isn’t that cool? Keep this one in your prayers for me.