Leader's Insight: Giving Value to Volunteers

From my journal: About two years ago, the wife of a friend of mine signed on to do volunteer work for a hospital. After appropriate training and skill-matching, she was assigned to the information desk at the front entrance with the charge to make people entering the hospital feel welcomed, at ease, and properly informed.

To put it mildly, my friend’s wife has flourished in this task.

I’m speaking of someone who has always been a volunteer. Some might describe her as an activist. Forty years ago before her Christian faith came alive, she (and her husband) had been among those who, as students, were highly involved in the civil rights movement. They were two of the many who marched in the streets, organized sit-ins, and distributed pamphlets calling for change in our nation’s racial attitudes.

Later, when she and her husband became “observant” Christians, they redirected all this volunteer energy toward the church and made significant contributions to the life of our congregation. They were the kinds of people you could always count on, whether they were out in front of the crowd (where the applause or criticism can both be found), or back in the kitchen (absent the crowd) where there was food to prepare and pots and pans to clean.

But now, two years back, the efforts of my friend’s wife were redirected into the life of a hospital (for free, mind you). At first I paid little attention to this, a regrettable oversight on my part.

Admittedly, I did notice over time that there were discernable, very pleasant changes in her personality. I was in a position to see this because we are all part of a small group that has met together monthly for more than 15 years.

What I saw was a person who was becoming more joyful, more self-expressive, more confident. If asked, she told inspiring stories of people she’d met at the hospital and how something she and others had done had served to captioner a bit of that person’s world. There was an obvious enthusiasm about her experiences. What was absent was complaint or criticism about organizational systems or forms of leadership, the kind of stuff I wish I heard less about. It was clear that she was proud of the institution she was serving and what she was doing for it.

More than once I asked myself: what was behind the transformation? After all, you don’t think about people in their late sixties going through fresh conversions of disposition.

Last week I mentioned my observations to her husband and asked him if I was seeing things correctly. He assured me that I was right on.

“It’s the hospital work,” he said. “The people there have a way of making every volunteer feel as if the hospital could not get along without them. From the CEO to the janitor, everyone is always finding ways to make the volunteers feel as if they are the most valuable people on earth.” He went on to regale me with stories of how hospital personnel—nurses, doctors, administrators, patients—showered his wife with words and gestures of appreciation.

“They have a way of making it so that you can’t wait to get to work,” he said.

“Are you telling me that they do a better job at affirmation and thanks then the church does?” I asked.

“There isn’t the slightest comparison,” he remarked.

It was in that conversation I learned that my friend was in the process of joining his wife in the hospital’s volunteer program. She’s still at the front desk. They have him somewhere else doing whatever is necessary to make patients and their families as comfortable as possible.

Understand what I’m saying?

Worth reading: James Houston’s Joyful Exiles (InterVarsity Press, 2006) has been my last month’s devotional reading. And it has enriched my spirit. A few of many sentences I underlined:

“Today I meet Christians who despair over the absence of reality in their faith because it was communicated to them cognitively and never allowed to develop emotionally.”

“It is the height of surrealism to make a profitable career of the cross of Christ … Even the world knows the difference between a sacrificial life and a self-centered one.”

“We start Christian service thinking that our natural interests and abilities can combine with God’s grace to achieve a noble cause. Then God begins to prune our lives, and we are ready to run away. But in the end the humble see God’s love in the smallest of things, whereas the proud don’t recognize the hand of God in the greatest of events.”

Peter Scazzero’s Emotionally Hecaptionhy Spirituality (Integrity, 2006): This book creates a helpful tension in my thoughts. He makes the point that a healthy spirituality can’t (or shouldn’t) be built on the foundation of an unhealthy emotional foundation. He makes an excellent point, one worth serious consideration. Yet the truth is that many of those whom we regard as our greatest Christian champions over the centuries were seriously over the top—emotionally, that is. Go figure.

Troubling to my heart: The national obsession over the Paris Hilton saga … 9 million children without adequate healthcare … the growing scarcity of many species of once-common birds … the failure of our national leadership to agree on an immigration policy (treatment of aliens and strangers is a biblical issue).

Inspiring to my heart: The very noble life of Ruth Graham … watching the international space station and the space shuttle (right behind) hurling across a dark New Hampshire sky … Jesus blessing the children … cuddling on the couch with my wife of 46 years and watching the Boston Red Sox cream the Yankees.

Pastor and author Gordon MacDonald is chair of World Relief and editor at large for Leadership.

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