Voices of Service

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December 06, 2010

As a Lasallian Volunteer…

Discernment is like trying to put together a matching outfit when you’re colorblind. You know that you need a top and that you need a bottom but you have more than one option for each and trying to find a combination that works, without the ability to recognize color, could take some time. Physical and human resources become important as you identify the appropriate apparel that will work for you. When it comes to discernment, going it alone without the ability to identify the unknown may not provide you with the best outcome. Long-term service has the potential to offer the physical and human resources that can guide you to your call. As a Lasallian Volunteer (LV), you are given much more responsibility than a person in a typical entry level job. Your average college graduate, freshly hired into an educational or social work setting, is rarely put in charge of a classroom or clients. LVs are, and they find out very quickly what their strengths and weaknesses are as well as how to react to them. With adequate support, being thrown into crazy situations and figuring out that you can handle it, leads you to finding out you can thrive.

Lasallian Volunteers are placed in locations where they are most needed, however they are also placed in cities where they haven’t lived before and therefore have no prior connections to friends or family. This allows LVs to focus entirely on their jobs and devote more time than most to their students and clients. LVs head out to student volleyball games, sacrificing trivia night in favor of building relationships with those they serve; or chaperone a dance on Friday rather than heading downtown for drinks. This allows or forces, depending on how you look at it, LVs to be present to their students and clients as much as possible and completely immerse themselves into their position. This aids the discernment process in numerous ways. If someone wants to become a teacher, this program will show you how much time and energy it takes to build the relationships and trust of students that is necessary for one to be successful at his/her job. This program doesn’t sugarcoat how difficult the learning experience will be at times, or how much time will be required. The experience however will reinforce the fact that you indeed do want to do that job for the rest of your life, or that it wasn’t necessarily your bag. Either way you learn many transferrable skills in the process. It helps to focus and narrow down what path you might follow both personally and professionally and it bases it on real life, tangible experience.

LVs also live in community, where they learn quickly to identify their social strengths and deficienties. Being placed in an intentional community with individuals you probably never would have lived with otherwise, tests your abilities of conflict negotiation, sacrificing personal wants for harmony of the group, following through on community obligations, etc. All of these skills are transferrable not only to future living arrangements, whether with friends or future life partners, but also in a business environment.

Long-term service will challenge you in ways you didn’t know you had the ability to navigate and give you a taste for success that not only builds up your self-worth but also equips you with tools and resources that allow you to discern your future roles in church, community, and home. St. John Baptist de La Salle once said, “…God, who arranges everything…gradually led me…in a manner that was hardly noticeable and…in such a way that one commitment led to another, without my having forseen it from the beginning.” Are YOU ready for a challenge, one that might lead you through discernment and into your life’s vocation? If so, long-term service might be for you.

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