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Focus Out — Self-Confident is not Self-Centered
Doing More for Others Does More for You
It’s important to take care of yourself, absolutely. It’s vital, even. But what’s more important? Looking out for others.
On Saturday mornings, for going on the past year now, I’ve spent my time at a Lutheran Church in the neighborhood next to mine, organizing groceries and items donated by Amazon and Whole Foods to a very needy community in my city of Baltimore. In my professional life, it took me years to gain a sense that I was capable, prepared, ready to take on my tasks. But at this feeding effort, I was ready. Within my first few weekends volunteering, I just “fit.”
Each Saturday, we have a team of 2 or 3 that pick up a rental truck and drive to the warehouse facility, then return to the church where we — a handful of volunteers — snap into action, carrying boxes and bins up the stairs to the gymnasium area where it needs to be sorted into basic categories, then we need to estimate how to distribute it (how many items of each type per bag, per family), then individually bagged and taken back downstairs so that it can be distributed to waiting families.
Part of the challenge is that the variety of items, and the number of items, changes from week to week, but also some of the volunteers working to package things are there because we’ve struck…
