Volunteer!

I have deliberated over my topic for this week for sometime now. I feel strongly about volunteering and other humanitarian acts, but at the same time I am very much against boasting about one’s good deeds and I absolutely hate to be preached at! Therefore, in the posts to follow I will do my best to introduce, encourage, and familiarize you with some ways to get involved in your community from my point of view, while doing my best to remove myself from the actions at hand. My goal is for people to understand that there are so many options for volunteering and that unforeseen events can often reveal your hearts true service route. 

I kept feeling like I needed to do this section of posts, so I recently mulled over the idea with a friend. She is also involved in her own set of volunteer acts, so I thought she would give an honest opinion. I began by reminding her the meaning I gave to the word domestress: a woman possessing great capability and keen skill in the design and beautification for her family, household, self and societal affairs while sometimes using unlikely objects and processes to achieve a desired result. I believe that many of our skills of self are born out of our understandings of and interactions with others. Though most results of design and beautification are surface level occasionally we can burrow an act or memory deep into ourselves that makes the world a prettier place. 

Earlier today, as I repainted a couple of old bread racks for a volunteer project (one I will discuss later in the week), I was still stirring over what I would say in this weeks set of posts. I began to see some similarities in those bread racks and people. I began to wonder where those bread racks had been in there life. Was there a chance that they had been in the chain of grocery stores my husband’s aunt had once owned? Had they even been purchased from the same place? I had purchased them at an estate sale. Estate sales always remind me how truly mortal I am anyway, but had they just served as garden racks after their days of cradling fragrant fresh bread had vanished? They were rusty, dirty and had clearly spent some years outside. But after a spray from the garden hose, a scrubbing with steel wool and a dusting of spray paint they were not in mint condition, but certainly...presentable. Had I not popped into that estate sale looking for something that I could hang things on and not thought of using these racks for a purpose they were not originally intended where would they be? Big trash day perhaps. That brings me to my final thought...where is that lost dog that I chose to drive by because I didn’t have room in the car? Where is that little girl that we never let in our social circle who had dropped out by high school? Where is that family you used to see at church, at the pool, at events before the recession? Tiny, seemingly insignificant acts of kindness (i.e. a new coat of paint) change the world...