National Volunteer Month 2021

Sue Holzberlein talks about her 24 years of volunteering at the BA

“If people knew how wonderful volunteering is, you would have so many volunteers you wouldn’t know what to do with them.” That’s what Sue Holzberlein, who has been volunteering at the BA for almost a quarter of a century, told us during a recent phone call. 

She explains, “Volunteering at the BA has inspired me to be more patient and more humble. It’s increased my conviction in the power of good. It’s made me recognize and realize God’s law of harmony and provision, not for just me, but for everybody. It reminds me of what it means to be a Christian Scientist, to have that sense of unselfed love. And, it reminds me of the importance of Christian Science Practitioners and Christian Science Nurses.”

Sue began volunteering on a Thanksgiving weekend about 25 years ago. It was a particularly challenging time of her life, and she felt she needed to follow the council she’d been raised with. “If you’re tempted to feel sorry for yourself, ask God, who needs help that I can give. Listen, and then give that help.” So, despite her full-time job and child-care responsibilities, she made room for volunteering at the BA one Saturday a month. She loved it, and has never stopped. 

“I was really inspired by the spiritual conviction, understanding, inspiration, and the constancy of the guests at the BA as they were here having their healing,” she recalls of those first years of volunteering. And she has stayed with volunteering ever since, because, as she describes it, she was “being blessed by the opportunity at the BA to see the spiritual reality of good that is present even where matter seems to suggest a different picture. I really felt impelled to see all the good that was truly going on.”

Last spring, when the BA had to close its campus to visitors and volunteers, Sue realized how much she missed volunteering. “I was so happy when I was asked if I would continue to do readings for the testimony meetings from home, because it re-connected me to the BA.” Using her experience as First Reader for her branch church during that time, Sue helped the BA come up with a way to continue its Thursday evening testimony meetings via Zoom. “Being a testimony meeting reader helps give focus and greater purpose to my spiritual study,” says Sue.

For Sue and for all the volunteers who have been finding ways to volunteer virtually via Zoom this year, the BA sends deep and heartfelt thanks. We are so grateful for our volunteers! The unselfed love they express adds an invaluable dimension to the healing atmosphere of the BA.