Last Sunday I talked about volunteering and its virtues as a spiritual practice. Several people asked me to repeat my admittedly tongue-in-cheek suggestion about a 24 hour volunteering ‘day’ at Westside. This is what I said:

“Just for the fun of it the other day I tried to calculate the number of volunteer hours here at Westside each week apart from paid staff. We’d include everyone in the RE program, gardeners, the Sunday social hour preparers, the covenant groups and affinity groups; we’d have committees and working groups and rehearsals. I decided to use 50 hours a week of volunteer time here.

It’s likely low. 50 hours a week times 52 weeks equals 2,600 hours a year. That’s about 108 24 hour days. That’s a little more than three months of volunteer work here and of course we know many of you here work many hours for Westside here and beyond the walls with your social action outreach. Those are labors of love.

108 days of volunteer labor of love already helps. The 108^th day of non-leap years is April 18.  Commit to take a day later than April 18 and make it your own volunteer day to Westside. Mine could be June 2, for example. And you can spread that volunteer time over the entire year. Your 24 hours of volunteering could be as simple as being a greeter or helping to count money after the service. It could be for the kitchen and social hour help. That could be 27 minutes each Sunday for a year.”

The numbers are all a bit silly, I suppose. Nonetheless they point toward the virtue of taking time to help others in community.

I hope you’ll take some time to become a unsung hero at Westside or beyond its walls as a representative of Unitarian Universalism in Seattle. Your work, your teaching, your pledges, your determination and much more all help Westside become both spiritual and religious.

Happy summer to us all!