The Secret To Success

Listen to The Secret To Success on the In His Footsteps podcast

Have you been asking God for the opportunity to learn a new talent or skill, or to have  a new item or even person in your life.  God said our guest, Myra Dolan, could have what she wanted if she was willing to do one thing.

What’s the one thing? Listen now to The Secret to Success on the In His Footsteps podcast

Scroll for the transcript if you’d rather read than listen. Also useful links and more.

Margaret Agard:  Today, we’re talking more about how service is the secret to success.  Myra Dolan shares an unusual experience.  She shares with us how God promised she could have what she was praying for but only if she used it to bless others.

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Margaret Agard:  This week’s Bible question is from Mike Shimmel.  Do we have to give up everything to follow Christ?  Why would he ask that?  What is the original Greek meaning of Luke 14:33, you might ask?  “So likewise whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.”

On the surface, Mike says, it seems too extreme if everything means everything, then we’re left with nothing.  For example, we would be naked.  Is that the literal translation of the verse?  Any and all information would be much appreciated. 

Well, as usual, you cannot take just a few words of the Bible out of context.  You can see what he meant by reading the entire chapter, Christ is telling us we must be willing to sacrifice all that we have if need be in order to follow him, not that we must give it up.  But that if asked, we would give it up.  We would walk that extra mile, give our coat to someone in need, stop playing video games, or posting on MySpace and Facebook and go out and help our family members or neighbors or share our food with the hungry.  It begins by pointing out that when we’re embarking on any undertaking we start by looking at the cost and then Christ tells us what the cost is.  The cost of being a disciple of Christ is to be willing to submit our will to his and to share all that we have as needed.

Today we’ll be continuing to talk about how service is the secret to success.  Myra Dolan had a twist on that that I found really unusual and I had to look back through my life and say has this ever happened to me?  I shared with you how service can be a secret to success in our careers by sharing this story about my son-in-law who lost his job in a dying industry, but because he’d taken the time to write articles in the industry magazines, sharing how he solved problems, he was offered another job within a week, at a better pay.  And I shared with you how my husband, Parker, went out and was just helping other people and didn’t have the time to work on our own garden because of everything he was doing and what he really wanted was manure for our 2,000 sq. ft. greenhouse.  About a week and a half of not being able to work on our garden because of that, all of the sudden, some people showed up with a huge, I’m talking huge, like double long monster truck of manure.  It was a mountain of manure in our front yard because Parker served and God loves to bless his servants.

Today, we’ll be talking with Myra Dolan, who wanted to learn a new thing.  Maybe you’re praying for something.  Maybe you’re praying for the ability to learn a new talent or a new job or whatever it is you’re praying for and God said to her in her heart, you can have it, but only if you’re going to use it to bless other people.  Here’s what happened.

Part of Charleston is a food desert.  Not that people don’t want to get fresh vegetables but that there are no grocery stores and the only places they can go to are places like a Go-Mart or someplace that will have apples for a dollar an apple, no lettuce or vegetables at all.

Myra Dolan:  You’re correct.

Margaret Agard:  Okay.  So, how did you get involved with the soup kitchen?

Myra Dolan:  Well, since this airs on Sunday, I’ll give you the Sunday version.  This is true.  It started because I felt like I didn’t want to leave this life without learning to garden and so I personally said a prayer and it’s one of those you know you’re heard and you receive  an answer kind of things, yes, I’ll help you to do this project.  Because I live on the side of a hill with forest there’s no way I can garden anything.  It’s dark with the trees, the shade, and the hard soil.  So I knew I couldn’t do anything here and never have been able to.  So it was answered, I knew I had that answer and the answer was in order to receive the help I would have to bless others with this project so I had to go find someone to start a garden with.  And I tried a couple of different places and then I knew I had to affiliate.

Margaret Agard:  So what you did was you got an answer and it was you’re going to have to bless others and you went out looking for the ways to bless, is that right?

Myra Dolan:  Yes, I had to go find someone who wanted to garden.

Margaret Agard:  And it didn’t all work out?

Myra Dolan:  Well, I went to the East End Main Street folks and couldn’t seem to—I just did place there and then I saw, well, I’ll call the soup kitchen and see their inner city.  I hadn’t really planned this all out real well but I just gave a call over.  I didn’t know the director and I said hi, I’m Myra and would you like to start a garden for the soup kitchen and she said yes.  It was like it was meant to be.

So we put our heads together.  It didn’t happen overnight.  We had our eye on a piece of adjacent land—

Margaret Agard:  Adjacent to—

Myra Dolan:  Adjacent to Manna Meal’s soup kitchen in Downtown Charleston and that little piece is what we wanted.  It took us a year to realize we were not going to get that so we had to say another little prayer and one of the volunteers, well, he wasn’t a volunteer up until that moment, brought in all the eggs that his chickens had laid, boxes of eggs, which was unusual, I guess, and then one of the, I think she’s the head cook at that time, asked him if he had any garden space and he said, why yes, and so the head cook direct him to me who I was there volunteering at that time and we got to know him, went to his house, saw the garden space, yes, oh, we were quite welcome to come in as a soup kitchen and start the garden while he had a tractor.  This is actually a small farm.

Margaret Agard:  When did this happen?  How many years ago was this?

Myra Dolan:  This is three years ago.

Margaret Agard:  Okay, so about four years ago, you had the prompting that—you prayed that you can learn to garden and you got an answer, yes, and then it was but you have to bless someone else…

Myra Dolan:  You have to bless, yes, it wasn’t about me at all.  I would get to learn to garden—that was my part.  Not that it would be for me, it was never for me or about me, but it was all of it.  And eventually, I would be called to bring that home and teach people at church.

Margaret Agard:  Okay, your first step was to just get out there and try to find someone who wanted that help and that wasn’t necessarily plopped down in your lap, you had to do some work.

Myra Dolan:  I had to work.

Margaret Agard:  And then you went and found someone who did want it and you spent a year trying to get it started on one piece of land and when you had, let’s say, exhausted all that effort, and realized that was going to fail, another prayer, and along comes chicken farmer.

Myra Dolan:  Right, with too many eggs.

Margaret Agard:  With a garden.

Myra Dolan:  And a farm and a willing heart, and he’s been perfect and we’ve been on his property.  It is private property about 10 minutes from the soup kitchen but it is rural, it’s out in the country and it’s perfect.  And he’s been supportive.  He’s our best volunteer as far as all the garden goes and while we’ve had a wonderful association and that was just the beginning.  That’s the beginning.  Every year that we start we’ll be beginning our fourth year of the garden but we always include at the beginning of the year, a blessing on the garden.  So we don’t forget where it came from.

Margaret Agard:  Oh good.

Myra Dolan:  We always give thanks.

Margaret Agard:  How did you get people to help?  How did you get the word out?

Myra Dolan:  Okay, well, Manna Meal was soup kitchen and it’s entering its 33rd year, I believe of operation and there was a pretty great volunteer base at that point.  We were getting it all online so we were collecting email addresses going out to meet different people at different events and getting mail addresses too.

Margaret Agard:  Well, what kind of event?  Give me an example.

Myra Dolan:  We went to the Sustainability Fair, we were part of that for three years and that’s something in downtown Charleston.  We started some of our own events.  We, at Capital Market downtown, we started the old fashioned bean stringing and that way we network with where people come in from all over the country actually.  We’ve met them as far away as California there at that event.

Margaret Agard:  What’s the old fashioned bean stringing?

Myra Dolan:  We’ll, that was something I had read in my journal of an ancestor and that was something the community did.  They weren’t allowed to go to dances or do anything.  Everything sort of centered in the community and it was centered around maybe making apple butter or molasses or the bean stringing?

Margaret Agard:  Oh, you mean like when you pull the string down the string beans?

Myra Dolan:  Yes!

Margaret Agard:  Oh so you just sit there doing the grunt work for getting string beans right in the can.  Okay.

Myra Dolan:  The theme is buy a pound, donate a pound, and sit down with us and string a pound.  And if you’ve not had a string bean or snap a bean, maybe that makes more sense to folks who don’t eat string beans but they’re the common favorite here.

Margaret Agard:  I have done plenty of those.  In fact, that’s why I hated canning.  It’s the thought of coming home when I was in grade school and having to sit down and string a bunch of beans instead of going out and play, but I like it now and usually we sit down and watch a movie.  But why would someone come from California to do that?

Myra Dolan:  Oh, this is a big farmer’s market in downtown Charleston.  And it offers unique products and food and then all the farmers come in on the summer and to set up outside so it draws people from all over.  When they come home to visit, they’re there.  So we actually use that as a fund raiser and a networking tool to meet folks in the community and let them know what we’re doing and we invite them to grow a row of produce if they gardened and donate it to the soup kitchen as well.  We also involve our master gardeners that are through the extension service here.  We are a project that has been accepted for credit so when someone goes to the master gardener training and has graduated as a master gardener volunteer, they have 30 hours of volunteer service to give somewhere.  And our garden space is actually a small working farm at this stage and they can come and learn how to grow produce.  Last year, we had an expert come out and teach how to build or how to weave trellises in the garden and just different things.  We’re experimenting with lasagna gardening this year—

Margaret Agard:  That’s the layer approach of your mulching…

Myra Dolan:  Compost layering, yes, compost layering and we had never used a big space for that.  We did composting one year in earnest, but this year, it is on the ground so we’re—

Margaret Agard:  Now, Myra, one of the things you said was the real problem at first was getting consistent volunteers, so I hear two ways of solving that I mean because…go ahead.

Myra Dolan:  That’s correct, well, we had that base, that volunteer base for the soup kitchen so we had email addresses and we just send out the message that we needed gardeners while you’re going to only appeal to a very small percentage of your volunteer base that wanted to come and maybe give food out in the soup line or something like that.  But we did glean a nice list of volunteers probably; I don’t know, 50, 60 people at that point.  Master gardeners would have supplied another great number, but as words got out as the garden grew and the effort grew, the newspaper gave us lots of media attention.  They are on our email list.  We let them know what we’re doing in every step of the way.  So they often put us in the paper or feature us in pictures.

Margaret Agard:  Oh, this is people that aren’t aware of you so that people who want to can.  The second idea like master gardener’s great because some people want to become master gardeners and that does take an effort to get that designation and the second way that you say is for some communities, it might be difficult because of how people are spread out to start a community garden where people would have to come in.  I’m thinking of say a little birch out in our area where they have a good soup kitchen but certainly a food bank and the idea that people could just designate a row…

Myra Dolan:  Right, well, what I would do in a smaller community, need a real good core group of at least five to ten people who will stay with it and promise to stay with it the full year.  You can do it with that or you can encourage those who do garden whether it be fruit trees, brambles, berries, or whether they have vegetable gardens to grow a row for that soup kitchen and to donate it.  That’s what I would do in a smaller community probably.

Margaret Agard:  Or tithe it.  You know, we’re always trying to figure out how much you think we saved on our food bill with our garden this year and maybe we should tithe that.  But this is a good way to tithe it too.

Myra Dolan:  It is.  The fruits of your garden are a wonderful way to tithe.  I agree.  That’s a great idea.

Margaret Agard:  Myra, how does has that impacted the Manna soup kitchen and the people who come?

Myra Dolan:  For the people or the soup kitchen in general?

Margaret Agard:  The people.

Myra Dolan:  The people.  Well, we have brought fresh produce to people who are in the food desert when we grow too much or we bring in overload the kitchen with excess that they can’t process.  It’s put out for people who come in and there are over 400 people a day that come to the soup kitchen and that’s open seven days a week.  They get to take it home.  We share it and then if we have too much cooked, which we have done in the past or really have a lot of excess, we can share it with the other agencies in town that take care of feeding hungry in shelter situations that’s happened.  And when we have sufficient volunteers, we clean and freeze our excess and we’re still using the product, I think we’re about halfway through what we froze last year.  We froze green beans from our bean stringing.  We had over 500 pounds of beans that we processed and froze from that event.  We used that also as a fund raiser—

Margaret Agard:  How did you do that?

Myra Dolan:  We actually did a raffle.

Margaret Agard:  Oh okay.

Myra Dolan:  But some people don’t do those, but that’s what we did and we raised about $1200 with our raffle at that event.  And then we sell flowers if we have them.  That is always a wonderful way to raise funds for a soup kitchen.

Margaret Agard:  Where do you sell the flowers, at that farmer’s market in Charleston?

Myra Dolan:  Actually, the little church where the soup kitchen is housed, they leased their kitchen.  We sell it to those folks that come out of church on Sunday.  We’re in there at the garden.  We cut the flowers fresh on Saturday morning and then there’s a lady who likes to design flowers and we just use old jars and vases whatever we can find, put them together, and then ask a donation and as those people leave church on Sunday, they’ll leave a little donation for the soup kitchen and take a vase of flowers and they bring the vase back the next week and there we go.  It’s sustainable and it constantly brings us the money we need to buy the small things to keep the garden going.

Margaret Agard:  Myra, how do you find time to do this?  You work full time, right?

Myra Dolan:  Yes.

Margaret Agard:  And have children, grandchildren?

Myra Dolan:  The children are grown. Yes, they’re grown, so it probably takes, in the summer, is when it’s busy, probably three hours on a Saturday is all it takes for me personally.  There’s a being complex organization, they have staff in the soup kitchen that handles everything on that end.  I’m just on the garden end and then we do the fundraisers on that end as well.  I would say I’ve had, I didn’t add them up, at least a hundred and some, maybe 200 hours, who knows, last year of pretty intense work throughout the year but we start gardening in March and we didn’t finish until mid-December this past year.

Margaret Agard:  What were you gardening in December?

Myra Dolan:  We were still harvesting our co-crops.

Margaret Agard:  You know because it was such a mild winter.  That’s true.

Myra Dolan:  It was.

Margaret Agard:  We’re still getting greens out of our garden.

Myra Dolan:  Yes.

Margaret Agard:  And we didn’t put any hoops over it or anything.  It keeps still coming up.

Myra Dolan:  I think we’re in a different zone now.  I’m hearing it’s the USDA is that who decides the growing zones that has moved a bit.  They’ve given us the little more growing time.

Margaret Agard:  How did it feel to take your passion for learning gardening and turning it into making a difference here?  What did you learn from it?

Myra Dolan:  I’m still learning.  I’ve learned to garden, and now I’ve been reeled in a little bit to bring it in and try to teach folks at church, I believe, to share a lot of things I’ve learned.  We’ve networked with the community extensively, Jean and I.  We just made so many friends.  That’s just unbelievable the good that’s come from it that’s far more growing vegetables, we’ve helped grow the community and at least our immediate community in real life how small it really is here in Charleston.  I think we’ve blessed a lot of lives.

Our work has been mentioned across the country.  It’s brought in people from other states who want to come and see the garden.  People came from Japan to do a documentary on the soup kitchen, if you can believe that.  It’s helping bless others.  I don’t know what else to say.  Even the silly little bean stringing, you know, the lady from California I was telling you about took pictures and took them back.  It’s hard to tell.  We don’t know was changed or what they’ve don’t with it but I know that I was on broadcast and I gave away all of our ideas to folks all over the country about a month ago to the American Community Gardening Association.  They were doing a webinar and this was community gardeners from all over the country and that’s just sharing our fundraising ideas.  That was my little part of it because we’d be so many, but in doing that, we’re growing a community.  I feel that very strongly that’s more unified.

Margaret Agard:  And you’re talking about this area around Charleston that you’re currently in these connections.  Okay, so anything I haven’t said yet that you’d like to say?

Myra Dolan:  It’s just been a real blessing.  I think anybody can do it.  You just start small with a prayer and if the Lord decides, he’s going to open the doors for you.  He will do it and it was one of those things…

Margaret Agard:  And the next thing you know, you’re the star of a documentary in Japan.

Myra Dolan:  We’re shucking the corn in Japan.  That’s what I was doing.  But it’s amazing.  We have through the garden gotten invited to all kinds of things.  She has gotten to go to this tech…

Margaret Agard:  Virginia Tech?

Myra Dolan:  And they just broke out thousands of people and they broke into little groups to talk about problems in West Virginia with community gardening.  I asked Jean that what she learned she said she’s in a little group and they talked about all the deer in West Virginia just decimating everybody’s efforts in the garden.

Margaret Agard:  It’s true.  We built a big fence around ours.  That’s for sure and fencing isn’t cheap, well, ours looks pretty cheap.  I’m not real fond of those pie plans hanging off the fence but whatever works.

Myra Dolan:  We all kind of laughed.  We just met all kinds of people that have a passion.

Margaret Agard:  The idea that you stayed in touch with a journalist and the other media people because that is the kind of thing people like to write stories about and it’s a give them and it’s a gift to you to get the word out that way.

Myra Dolan:  They do.  And we blog.  Oh, I should have that.  Go to MannaMeal.com.  We blog everything we do with our garden and so if anybody wants to see what we’ve done or how we’ve raised funds and just some of the events, we’ve got two years of blog on there.

Margaret Agard:  (Inaudible 0:24:22) people down there harvesting in November 19th, oh I just hate that because Bill supposed to work on our remodelling our house when he’s not gardening and I hate when the gardening starts to March and goes to December because then I don’t have to work because generating power, we must be buying seeds.  Okay, that’s right.

Myra Dolan:  And then we just learned that, which is interesting for those on food stamps that you can purchase garden plants and seeds with your food stamps and that is a great way to extend what little you’re given.  It might buy you one can of beans but you plant beans, you’ll have a whole summer of beans.  So if you make the Lord your partner, you got it made.

Margaret Agard:  Well, that’s an interesting twist on service and how God will bless us if we’ll bless other people.  One last story I want to story I want to share with you from my second book “In His Footsteps: Becoming one with Parker”.  Parker and I were getting ready to sell everything we had to go service missionaries and we were in the process of doing a couple of things to fix the house up so that it would pass inspections.  It was hard work and we were under the gun.  We had to be out by a certain date.  And we had one project that was going to take us about a week and then another project that we talked about that would at least three to four days.  No one could help us with it and we could not think of a simpler way to do the project than we were doing it or a faster way to do it.

I can’t tell you what the second project, but I can tell you that while we were in the middle of this, the phone rang one day and I had to drop everything we were doing, ran as fast as I could to the phone, and when I picked it up, I heard a voice on the other end say, will you take my elderly father to his doctor appointment tomorrow because for some reason I can’t do it.  And I thought, you know what, immediately, this elderly man lived an hour from my house in one direction and the doctor was nearly an hour in the other direction.  So just to go pick him up, get him in the car, it would take 15 minutes, come back to my house and go past it to the doctor was going to take three and a half hours plus the time at the doctor plus the time to get the person back, so there we’re already looking at a full day, at least eight hours.  And all I could think was we don’t have time for that.  So I was like nnnnnn…yes because I know service is the secret to success.

And sure enough, it went exactly as I thought.  Three hours and a half after I left my house, I had him at the doctor’s.  And then of course, we’re sitting, waiting because doctors never have you in on time, he finally went back in for his appointment I started just looking through those women’s magazines and one of them had a story in it about a couple who were doing the exact same project we were and they had come up with a way to solve the problem that only would take a day.  So here we thought it would take us three to four days and instead, using their method, we’d be able to do it in a day or less.

I gave up a day of my time, God gave me back three.  That is the way that works.  Service is the secret to success.  Service is the secret to success in your career and relationships when you have a problem to solve like I did when you want to develop a new talent like Myra did.  We are blessed in, by, through, and because of our service.  Drop by the website https://inhisfootsteps.com and share your stories of how service has been the secret to success in your life.  I’d love to hear them.

More Information

Myra Shares Fundraising Ideas and Getting Started

The Amazing Bible Timeline Poster

Do We Really Have To Give Up Everything To Follow Christ?

Bible Questions and Answers