It’s nice to get gold stars once in a while

To the left is a shot of the thank-you cards that I received on Tuesday evening at the annual dinner/meeting of the Cherry Creek Chorale.  I’d been putting away the leftovers and so sat in the back as the meeting started.  There seemed to be a lot of cards being passed around, but I didn’t think much of it since we have one member in the hospital and a couple others who are leaving. To be honest I didn’t think about it all that much.

As the meeting drew to a close my dear friend Mary Ann came up to the mike and said she wanted to say something, then made a graceful and gracious thank-you speech for all the stuff I do for the group and gave me the cards.  Everyone stood and clapped.  What a lovely gesture!  I truly enjoy what I do and don’t need or expect thanks, but even so it was very gratifying.  I even plan to keep the cards!  That’s quite a concession for me; I’m just about the opposite of sentimental.  There are a few mementos in my headboard, though, and these cards will join them.

​I think a good bellwether of how you really feel about a service you do is how much you crave appreciation and acknowledgement for it.  A number of years ago I volunteered to be a discussion leader for a Bible study organization I attended.  My motivations weren’t based on anything all that great:  I was very frustrated with my current group leader, and I felt that I couldn’t complain about her unless I was willing to do something about it, i.e., leading a group myself.  So I signed up to be a leader the next year.  And while I loved the group I was assigned, and I did a good job of keeping us on track and yet giving members the opportunity to share, I found myself becoming very resentful as the year went on.  In order to lead a 45-minute discussion with pre-assigned questions I had to attend a weekly meeting that lasted around 2 1/2 hours, most of which was spent on activities I considered to be non-essential.  I hate meetings anyway.  But a further reason why I felt that way had to do with my reasons for signing up in the first place, a sense of obligation.  I was filling this position not because I wanted to but because I felt that I had to.

Along the way I ran across some material on the difference between a servant and a volunteer, and I realized that I was squarely in the volunteer camp for this particular situation.  Volunteers, at least in the semantics of that material, are people who look upon their work as something on the side, who feel that they can quit at any time because, hey, they’re volunteers!  Who can get (here’s where it hit home for me) resentful over what they’re being asked to do.  Who tend to keep track of their time and effort.  When I read that material I thought, ‘Hey, that’s me!  I think I need to step down from being a discussion leader.’  Which I did.

But a servant is a whole different story.  Servants consider what they do to be a privilege, not an obligation.  They want to do what they do; they take ownership of their work.  And yes, that’s how I feel about my work for the Chorale.  I do it because I want to, not because I have to.  And so any expressions of appreciation are nice extras but not at all necessary.  They’re not what keeps me going.

Really, if you think about it, you can apply this servant/volunteer dichotomy in every endeavor, every relationship.  You don’t always get to choose what you do, but you can always choose to examine and improve your attitude about what you do.  Interesting and important issue, isn’t it, thoughts about which have grown out of some thank-you cards and applause?  I’m going to do some real thinking and praying about my servanthood tendencies, or non-tendencies, in general.

What about you?  Are you a servant or a volunteer?