Wayne
Manning Of all the good things that have
happened to me since coming to Auburn a year and a half ago, one of the
most rewarding was being asked by my friend Randy Wall to consider joining
the Auburn Rotary Club. Prior to the first few luncheon meetings I
attended, if you had asked me to define Rotary it would have been
something about a group of business people, mostly men, who meet for lunch
or breakfast and do business deals. A service club that serves mostly its
members. I couldn’t have been further from the truth. First, there is a banner that hangs somewhere in every Rotary meeting that I have attended that contains Rotary’s “Four-way Test” in letters large enough to read from anywhere in the room:
Rotarians
are encouraged to apply this test to all of life’s endeavors, whether
public or private, business or pleasure, sacred or secular. The luncheon
meetings in my particular group are typically light-hearted, fun, and
sometimes even a little ribald and rowdy, but running like an undercurrent
through each gathering is the call and response of the Four-way Test. Second,
Rotary International, with about 1.2 million members in 29,000 clubs in
161 countries, takes the challenge of planetary problems seriously. The
eradication of polio all over the world has been a major Rotary initiative
since the inception of the international PolioPlus Program in 1985. Rotary
International, in partnership with the World Health Organization, is
committed to a polio-free world by 2005. An enormous amount of money,
time, and energy has been donated by Rotarians everywhere to help
eliminate this scourge in people’s lives, especially in the lives of our
world’s children. According
to Rotary International’s excellent and informative web site (www.rotary.org),
“In 1988, polio existed in more than 125 countries on five continents,
with more than 350,000 children being paralyzed every year. By the end of
1999, the number of polio-infected countries had fallen to only 30; polio
had been eliminated from three of the five infected continents; and
reported polio cases had fallen to 6,659. Even within the remaining
polio-infected countries there has been dramatic progress. Most
remarkably, in India, which historically reported 60 to 70 percent of the
world's cases, the virus is rapidly retreating to a few northern states as
a result of accelerated efforts in that country.” Rotary
is an organization of business and professional leaders united worldwide,
who provide humanitarian service, encourage high ethical standards in all
vocations, and help build goodwill and peace in the world. Finally, Rotary (all three of our
local clubs) is very active right here in Auburn and Placer County,
finding needs and meeting them. Just since I have been a member, the
Auburn Rotary Club has funded and totally renovated the playground at
Pineview School in Newcastle (in collaboration with the Placer County
Sheriff’s Department), equipped our city and county police cars with
life-saving defibrillators, and is currently providing our Auburn Fire
Department with a thermal imaging device, which will help our
fire-fighters locate people quickly in smoke-filled environments. My church, Unity of Auburn, is a
tithing church. We teach tithing to our faith community, and the church,
in turn, tithes to causes we corporately believe in. We participate
joyfully in these, and other community projects, with our money and time.
Our folks are glad to know that part of the gift they give helps to do
God’s work in our larger community. For what Rotary does is God’s
work, I’ve found. Not that Rotary is a religious institution by any
means. It isn’t. But, minds and hearts coming together to help our
schools and life-supporting agencies, and other such worthwhile endeavors,
is the essence of the action side of the Gospel in my view. And that is
practical religion at its best, putting our money, time, and energy into
improving the quality of life for God’s people as best we can. On a personal note, my life has been tremendously enriched by the ongoing fellowship with the men and women I have met and become friends with as a consequence of becoming a member of Rotary. I don’t wear a lot of jewelry… my wedding ring and a wristwatch. Last year I added a Rotary lapel pin. I wear it proudly.
|