Helping Clean the Building

For the last month, I've been serving as the Brighton Ward Building Cleaning Coordinator. My job in that calling is mostly to invite and direct volunteers from the Ward to help clean the building and to make sure that the building gets clean, no matter how many (or how few) volunteers I get on any given week. Usually, this means that, after directing a few volunteers to the highest-priority tasks, I help clean the building as well, working with my volunteer team or in other areas of the church building, as the situation requires. This morning was different. This morning, I hardly got a chance to help clean the building, but according to one of my volunteers, I was helping.

I got a lot of volunteers this week, nearly twice as many as I was expecting. As much as I wanted to help clean the building with them, I had my hands full directing the volunteers, keeping track of which had and hadn't been done yet, managing cleaning equipment, and resolving the volunteers' concerns. Especially toward the end, I tried to help clean the building alongside my volunteers, but the team didn't need another set of hands. The team needed a leader, and I was it.

I apologized to one of the volunteers that I had tried to help, but she assured me that I was already helping. Being a supervisor doesn't always seem like working because it's mostly just telling others what to do, but directing the work-flow can, as it turned out, be a full job. It certainly kept me busy this morning, too busy to help in other ways. But even though I couldn't help my team clean the building directly, I was able to help them by making sure that every important task was getting done and that no one ended up accidentally cleaning a room that someone else had already cleaned. It wasn't the kind of work I wanted to do, but it was a job that needed doing, and I was the one assigned to do it.

In life, there are many roles that need to be filled, and people can help each other in different ways. Some jobs may seem more useful than others, but all the jobs that need doing are jobs that need doing. Today, I needed to do more coordinating than cleaning. Other days, it's the opposite. Mostly, my job is to keep track of what needs doing and to make sure that somebody's doing it. Today, we had a lot of volunteers to coordinate, and the one who had to coordinate them was me.

I promise that I'll help clean the bathrooms and vacuum the chapel when I get an opportunity to, but the task that I have been assigned is to coordinate. That task needs doing just as much as the others do, and I need to learn to be okay with that. I couldn't do much to help clean the building today, but I still did my part to help the team get it clean.