Saturday morning we did not sleep in. Instead, Jess and I headed out to W.A.R.M. (Westerville Area Resource Ministry), where some friends and we had signed up earlier in the month to volunteer for their annual Thanksgiving distribution. W.A.R.M. is a cool little non-profit Christian organization, whose chief objective is to get those in Westerville who’ve had a tough run of circumstances back on their feet.  In an effort to do this, they collect and offer food to those in need (”clients”) and provide all sorts of career, family and Christian counseling. 

Its operations are housed in a low building directly off uptown Westerville’s main drag, tucked away in a small slumbering neighborhood. Through its doors are a handful of counselor rooms, a larger room for holding meetings, a waiting room for clients with appointments, and the inventory room, complete with donated shopping carts and canned and packaged food filed away on shelves in orderly fashion. A recently painted mural by volunteers decorates the back wall where food donations are deposited into a metal drop slot.     

We were assigned our positions beforehand via email, and I was given partial responibility for parking cars. The other parking attendants included my friend, Ben, and a spry older fellow named John, who wore an Ohio State cap and was very glad to meet us. Jess was especially pleased with her lot, for she was handed a camera and instructed to fire snapshots of the event at will. And Kelly, Ben’s pregnant wife, who is due with her second in less than a month, was placed in charge of greeting the clients and handing out pies until they ran out. 

Before the event took off, the staff and volunteers opened with a prayer, which Jess and I gracefully stumbled right into the middle of, because we were late. After the “Amen’s,” the woman in charge ran down the attendance list, and deciding that all but three of us were present, sent us directly to our stations.

 Ben and I were ripped away from our wives, who had long forgotten about us and were eager to get right down to business, and led outdoors to the frigid parking lot. Jess was nice enough to lend me her mittens. Here we were given complete reign over the parking lot, with nothing more than our arms for waving, our fingers for pointing, our mouths for screaming incase we got hit, and the specific instructions to park cars.     

A mother and her daughter were set up at the parking lot entrance for gaining the clients’ attention and to funnel them through to a smiling Ben, who would direct them my way. We stood like a bunch of winding clocks, waving our arm in a circular motion, guiding the general flow of incoming traffic. 

At first, it was widely held that my job was to throw the drivers into utter confusion and to obstruct any of their efforts to get to the W.A.R.M facility before the Ohio State-Michigan noon kick-off. I nearly arranged for a head-on collision between two cars, and, unknowingly, there was a further attempt on my part to lure a woman in a minivan into a defected parking space, containing a nasty looking piece of wood.

“I saw that wood,” said the lady out her minivan window, parking anywhere but the spot I was leading her. Feeling slightly embarrassed, I ran over and moved it to the side.

With time, however, the communication between Ben, John and me improved and it wasn’t long before I felt like I’d been parking cars all my life. “Got one coming your way,” I’d shout to John, confidently.

“Got ’em,” John would say, beaming, his left arm straight out, pointing the way like the North Star, his right bringing the driver home nice and steady. It was just like clockwork. At the bend, Ben was looking quite comfortable, too, and when a homeward bound car tore past him, attacking him with an emphatic ”O-H,” Ben fired back an “I-O” without so much as a hitch in his wind.

The clients were an exceptionally nice group, and almost everyone pulled up wearing Ohio State gear and joyful smiles. When the drivers got out, we’d converse in the universal language of Ohio State football. Then they’d go their way smiling and shouting “Go Bucks,” leaving me to think how great God was for creating sports and food for bringing together people we’d normally never meet.       

After it was all said and done, I’d managed to wolf down a brownie offered to me by the W.A.R.M. staff and a cup of hot coffee. Things got slightly more challenging with a cup of coffee in hand, but by that time, I’d already mastered the art of parking cars one handed.

When 11:00am rolled around, we reconvened back inside where it was warm and listened to some of the stories shared about the day. The strong staff-client relationship was clear. There had been hugs, discussions of blessings, and an exciting annoucement by one lady about landing a steady job.

A good time was had by all, and we were glad we had volunteered.  

Categories: Christianity, Community