a time to serve

This Christmas season has been a fun one so far. I've got my list all ready for my loved ones (stockings and presents and surprises, oh my!), and the Christmas cards are (mostly) out and the packages to the family members are all out.

But something else that I've really been enjoying is service opportunities. I want to serve more. In fact, I've already started working on my 2010 resolutions and in it I included a goal to do at least 6 organized or thought-out service projects during the year. I really want to get outside of myself and help others.

This Christmas has had lots of opportunities to help.

Shane's work group at Boeing sponsored a family through an organization called Housing Hope. They learned the family consisted of a single mom with an 8-year-old girl and 4-year-old boy. The girl liked Barbies and the boy liked hockey. Shane was in charge of spending between $50 and $100 on the boy! He found a hockey net with sticks and pucks, and he sent me on a mission up to the Everett Silvertips (local WHL team) store to buy some hockey stuff. I even had the grand idea to get discounted hockey tickets, and we were thisclose to getting them -- the manager offered them to me at a great price! -- but we needed to pick a date for a game night and Shane didn't feel comfortable doing that. In the end we got the boy a Silvertips T-shirt and jigsaw puzzle, a generic hockey calendar, and a hockey poster of a Washington Capitals player who I guess is good but I've never heard of before.

Then, to top it all off, Shane got the job of delivering all the stuff to Housing Hope.....which meant it made more sense for me to do it! Yesterday, I delivered a bunch of Barbie and hockey stuff and gift card for mom. Housing Hope then wraps it all and delivers it to the family. It felt so good.

In a similar vein, the Young Women at Church did a really cool service activity for the Forgotten Children's Fund. They have a ton of toys and books and coats and everything in this big warehouse space. We showed up and are assigned a family, then we went "shopping" for the family and wrapped and bagged all the presents. Our family was a single mom, a mentally handicapped young adult, and two young children. The young women got to hand-pick three big toys, hats and scarves and coats, stocking stuffers, and books for the children, plus presents for the young adult and Mom. There were reams of beautiful shiny wrapping paper to wrap it in, then we packaged it all up in sacks that looked like Santa bags! It was a neat experience. I'm so impressed this stuff goes on around the holidays.

For Christmas in the Gottula home we're getting a number of wild and crazy gifts, like an office chair and a vacuum. In turn, we needed to get rid of our old (well-loved) office chair and vacuum. Shane has strong opinions and hated them both vehemently, but I have strong opinions against blanketly throwing stuff away.

So, I posted them on Craigslist -- for free.

In an hour, I had 8 people respond about the chair.

In an hour and a half, I had 13 people respond about the vacuum.

A few of the chair people were non-committal, and I finally gave it away to a UW student named Kirk from Seattle. The vacuum went to the first guy who emailed me, Larry, who said he lived with a few mentally handicapped people and they didn't have a vacuum currently. Wow. Just that made me feel like maybe I too was really helping someone this Christmas.

To ice the cake, I got this email from Kirk, the office chair guy:

Angela,

My wife and I ended up coming over at about 8:30 pm and picked up the chair last night. I wanted to thank you so much for letting us have the chair for free. My wife and I were talking about how much of a hassle that it would be to give something like that away when it would be much easier just to throw it in the trash. Thanks again for being such a good person and helping out a poor college student.

Kirk

Omigosh, isn't that the nicest thing EVER??? I couldn't make this stuff up; his email just blew my mind. It just goes to show that Shane's trash is definitely someone else's treasure. I suppose I could have charged money for this stuff, and maybe gotten a taker or two, but you know I didn't need to and I just I wanted to get rid of it. I wanted someone to have it who would use it. Maybe in a couple weeks Kirk will decide the chair is awful (like Shane had decided), but maybe not. We were poor college students when we got it, and now we passed it on to him.

Anyway, I think service is important and I want to be better about it in my life. I've made it a goal for myself. I hope you feel served this Christmas, because we all need people to do nice things for us every once in awhile.