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I used to think volunteering was something you gave away
an hour, a Saturday, a spare piece of yourself.
Then I stood in a room at Create Community,
watched people arrive guarded, half-formed by other people’s assumptions,
and I learned the first rule of showing up for someone:
don’t decide who they are before they’ve told you.
I stopped looking for what was missing in people
and started looking for what was already whole in them.
That’s the whole practice, really
connecting to someone’s highest potential
instead of their history, their label, their bad day.
Nobody warns you what that does to you.
You go in thinking you’re the one who gives,
and you come out lit up, wide awake, alive
not tired the way a shift tires you,
but alive the way a purpose does.
This is what nobody tells you about values:
they’re not things you hold.
They’re things you have to hand to someone
before you find out you actually meant them.
So, here’s my question, since I found mine this way
not do you have values,
everyone has values
but where are you spending the hours
that would let them out?
Because somewhere near you right now
is a room like the one I found.
And someone in it is waiting
to be seen as more than they’ve been told they are.
Go be the one who sees them.
You’ll leave more alive than you arrived.
Jill Chapman