All my life I've been told to be wary of my selfishness. Tame the desires of the flesh and Put others' interests above your own. The underlying message I received was that I cannot trust myself because what I want is usually bad, rarely biblical, and hardly appropriate for polite conversation over cookies after church. However, anything I could talk about in the self-sacrifi cing language of the gospel- denying myself to take up the cross of inner-city poverty, being a missionary in a distant developing country, or being a pastor to help shepherd a congregation- now that charmed the socks off the old ladies at my church.
Consequently, I developed a volunteer rap sheet that might have made Mother
Teresa blush. No, seriously: if volunteering and helping out were Olympic events, I am pretty sure I would have had my heyday on the front of a Wheaties box. Writing up my résumé often gave me trouble because the section for service always seemed to eclipse my work experience. But it didn't matter. If I was applying for a job shoveling popcorn at a movie theater, they would know that I'd been shoveling kids around in Sunday School since eighth grade, and that I would do a darn good job at their theater too.
You can maybe imagine how hard it was for me to hit bottom. For me, running on altruism as a motivation is a little like the theory of Peak Oil: it's a finite resource that eventually runs dry.
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Nick Bryant (2007 Krista Colleague) serves with Tierra Nueva -New Earth in Burlington, Washington, as a pastoral advocate with migrant workers, exoffenders, and people off the street. Nick also spends part of the year in Honduras where he spends an unholy amount of money on ice cream and assists the Honduran Tierra Nueva staff in their promotion of sustainable farming methods, preventative health, nutrition, and appropriate technologies among small-scale rural farmers.
