Volunteer Spotlight: The Fight Against the Idol of Convenience

By First Choice Volunteer, Ryan Godfrey

About six months ago, as I was reading Psalm 106 I was struck by the idolatry of the Israelites. The Psalm notes that their idolatry led them to sacrifice their children to demons and that Israel had become a land polluted with blood (vs. 34-38).

It occurred to me that America too has become a land polluted with blood. Dead babies are thrown into trash cans as they are sacrificed to the idols of convenience, greed, lust, and selfishness.There is truly a holocaust of unborn children worse than anything perpetrated by Hitler or Stalin.

So as a go-getter alpha male who joined the Marine Corps after 9/11 hoping to personally get Bin Laden (I didn’t), I decided to rekindle my brief professional relationship with Amber Lehman at First Choice. She got me plugged in with regular 3 hour a week volunteering with clients.

Quickly, one of the disappointing aspects of reality set in, its unwillingness to be as exciting and headline-grabbing as we might like. I had set out to be directly responsible for saving the lives of as many little ones as possible. Of course, I quickly found out that these sorts of things are long-haul situations. Long-term faithfulness and perseverance trump enthusiasm and sheer will power.

I would have to recalibrate my expectations and submit to the long,grueling process of building relationships, loving people, and gently helping clients to value the life that was already silently present with them.  So I’ve only been involved with First Choice for about six months. But in this time, I have been able to invest in, pray for, and encourage four different couples. Two of them stand out to me.  

1.)  One of these couples has experienced a significant positive change in their living situation that can be directly attributed to prayer. This same couple has also noticeably grown in affection for Christ and is faithfully attending a local church.

2.)  Another of these couples came in only a few weeks ago seeking an abortion because finances and life circumstances seemed overwhelming. First Choice provided them with substantial financial assistance for rent, and I am in the process of helping the future dad pass the writing portion of the GED. The mother is now already six months along, and they intend to keep the little one!

So while the financial and material assistance are a big part of the ministry, it is important to notice the impact that simple, genuine encouragement, prayer,and love can have on someone who feels overwhelmed without a friend in the world. Men, while any one of you may not be able to look back on your first year of volunteer time with a clear sense that “I said this or that one thing and this young couple or young lady had an epiphany and realized the error of their ways and went on to win a nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court and overturn Roe v Wade.” You can certainly know that your time invested in people was not wasted.

 If I may indulge in a long passage from John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (page 137):

By virtue of our sharing in Christ’s royal mission, our support and promotion of human life must be accomplished through the service of charity, which finds expression in personal witness, various forms of volunteer work, social activity, and political commitment. This is a particularly pressing need at the present time, when the “culture of death” so forcefully opposes the “culture of life” and often seems to have the upper hand. But even before that it is a need which springs from “faith working through love”(Gal 5:6). As the Letter of James admonishes us: “what does it profit, my brethren, if a man says he has faith but has not works? Can his faith save him? If a brother or sisteris ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (2:14-17). In our service of charity, we must be inspired and distinguished by a specific attitude: we must care for the other as a person for whom God has made us responsible. As disciples of Jesus, we are called to become neighbors to everyone (Lk.10:29-37), and to show special favor to those who are poorest, most alone and most in need.

Here you have as good an exhortation as any to get to work on the hard task of loving others over the long-haul, regardless of the return. 

So now the question is how much time are you willing to give to the cause of life? Sacrificing two or three hour-long TV shows a week is all it would take to contribute significantly to someone else’s need for wise counsel or just a loving and welcoming ear.