Whatever your talents or skills, invariably you are asked to employ those abilities in some way for the organizations and congregation you belong to. Whether it is computer technology, cuisine, art, flooring, teaching, retail, marketing or carpentry, there always seems to be a calling in your house of worship for expert, free labor.As a journalist, I have long been the person groups recruit for their newsletters or to be the scribe and secretary for the meeting minutes, producing brochures and editing materials. For a church early in my newspaper career, I was editor and writer of the monthly church newsletter — not to mention doing newsletters weekly for my service club, for the service club district, for my neighborhood association and the local Friends of the Library. I was doing a sixth regular newsletter at that time for my newspaper correspondents scattered around an area of Northeast Iowa. Every night, I’d go home from work to labor on another newsletter. It was mostly the pre-word processor era.
Monday will mark my 20th anniversary as a member of the Kiwanis Club of Tempe. It was a Tempe Congregational church pastor who sponsored me as a member. A year later, they tapped me to be their next president, for 1988-89. (They even chose me Kiwanian of the Year three times). I am now in my 17th year of writing and producing the club’s weekly newsletter, or bulletin, as it is called. It ties me up every Thursday night so I can put it into the mail on Friday mornings.
For about 18 years, I have been the Kiwanian charged with giving the invocation to start the formal luncheon meetings. I estimate that I have given about 900 invocations to my club. I rarely do them off the top of my head. I write them beforehand. Trying to be original is a daunting challenge.
Before I became the permanent prayer-offerer for that Kiwanis club, the job of invocation was assigned automatically to members on a rotation basis, going right down the Club roster. Some members dreaded the assignment. Some used packaged prayers, some tried to be clever, some made them creatively short. Most invocations were a mix of standard prayer words plus a Kiwanis call to serve others faithfully.
Clearly I got recruited for the assignments because I was the religion editor over at the newspaper.
By the same reasoning, I have been tapped to be secretary and the minute-taker for the hundreds of meetings I have attended for organizations.
In 43 years of writing for publication, I have a massive body of printed and published works, not to mention so many now all over the Internet on so many web sites. My attic contains many boxes of yellowed newspaper clippings from the 1970s, and my wife hopes they aren’t just fodder for a fire some day. Long gone is the massive number of meeting minutes, invocations and correspondence.
Writing is just about the only way I have made myself useful over the years.
While some of us don’t welcome being recruited to do that “same job all over again for charity (”Give me a different job,” they say), we are wise to willingly serve others with the best that’s in us, even if we are just a one-trick pony.
