I’ll admit, I had an unusual level of anxiety about participating in this year’s D.C. Cares Servathon.
In fact, it wasn’t even remotely normal.
When I had gotten the invitation from WIN to join a group that would be cleaning up and painting one of the House of Ruth‘s Washington, D.C. women’s shelters, it had sounded like a good idea at the time.
And then I started thinking about skills.
And how few I had to offer.
I began having flashbacks to a work-camp trip I’d taken with a friend’s church when I was young, and how we’d gotten into trouble for not really helping do anything.
We’d had some difficulty making it clear, I guess, that it wasn’t that we didn’t want to do anything, but that largely, we had no idea how to do anything.
We’d wandered around lost, trying to make ourselves look busy, while not actually being sure what we could or could not touch, or should or should not do to avoid messing anything up or cutting off someone’s finger.
Sort of like what I do now, in the kitchen at other people’s dinner parties or when visiting my mom, before she finally hands me a spoon and says, "It’s okay dear, just stir. Or perhaps you’d like to go balance the checkbook?"
We all have our strengths and skills, and for me, painting and yard work are not generally among them.
Largely because I’ve never painted, or done much in a yard besides rake or pick up a hedgeapple or two. Or be called out by my mother to admire her petunias, wherein I would say, "Cool. What’s a petunia?"
I imagined myself standing alone, sort of wandering around touching tools while everyone else worked and said, "See that girl? She’s not doing anything."
But, astoundingly, I found that I was actually useful, and had a great time.
Not only did I meet a lot of fun, new people, but I learned how to turn soil, plant grass seed, weed and lay out mulch (after, of course, finding out what mulch is),
Not to mention serving as a self-instated project director for the drawing and painting of the four-square court for the kids.
I do, after all, have a particular flair and passion for four-square, having served as one of the longest fifth-grade champions of the "sport" ever known to the history of my graduating elementary school class.
So, as our work dried, and we stood back to admire the new four-square and hop-scotch courts we’d painted, and the cleaned up green space and freshly laid grass seed that had been–just a few hours before–a muddled array of weeds, trash and cigarette butts, I couldn’t help but thinking that this had proven to be a most productive day.
Because not only were there kids watching from the deck, nearly coming out of their shoes hopping around in anticipation of playing on the courts once they dried, but I’d learned another powerful lesson about the power of giving together.
Because it means that you don’t have to know it all to give.
Just that you have to be open to having something to contribute.
And that through the giving, what you just might get is an expanded sense of who you are, and what you have to give.
