A Caring Work

My roles Virtual Assistant and Birth Doula are highly non-traditional, but unmistakably God-orchestrated. As a VA, I work with clients on a variety of online projects to ensure the success of their businesses: preparing blog posts, creating images, managing social media, and so on. This is a bread-and-butter job, it provides necessary supplemental income for our household. And, thankfully, it is a flexible job that allows me to focus most of my week on raising my two daughters. In my role as a birth doula, I support expectant mothers prenatally by meeting with them and addressing their questions and concerns about their pregnancy. During labor I help mothers cope with pain, communicate needs, and feel confident. Once the baby has arrived, I help ensure the family is off to a strong start and refer resources as needed. These vocations seem worlds apart, but they are tied together by a desire to serve others.

What I appreciate about my unique jobs is that, everyday, I interact with the mundane and the extraordinary. Of both of my titles, ‘Virtual Assistant’ is certainly the most humdrum. I receive emails detailing tasks, I complete those tasks, and wait for more. Too often I get lost in the rigamarole. My work is also very solitary, just me and my computer. I crave those fabled watercooler conversations, like I enjoyed in jobs past. When I am creating Pinterest posts and schedules, it can tempting to feel like my work is small and meaningless. “I’m just clocking in and out for a paycheck,” I’ll think.

But then when I have a strategic email correspondence with a client, and she tells me how my work has been sending increased traffic to her blog, I get encouraged. My small and meaningless tasks don’t seem so small anymore. By helping her content get increased exposure, she experiences success, which is my number one goal as her assistant. It’s refreshing to get a bird’s eye view of how my on-the-ground work pays off.

Naturally, watching families welcome new life into their homes is very directly impactful work. As a Christian, it is a blessing to watch births unfold and be reminded that apart from Christ we can do nothing. Birth demonstrates our weakness, and our desperate need for a Savior. Proclaiming the Gospel, while helping couples adjust to life as new parents, has been deeply moving and transformative. And at the same time, I have been challenged. God has graciously seen fit to rip away the pride I had previously touted over my own natural births. In walking with women through one of the most vulnerable times of their lives, it is humbling to recall they mirror the human condition: in pain, helpless, needing a Savior. And, in God’s great mercy, He provides deliverance through childbirth (doulas, epidurals, C-sections, and so on) as well as deliverance from our greatest problem: our sinful selves. This work seems grand and important every time I do it.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, I am well aware both my jobs are unconventional. But what I love about them is their ability to remind me to keep a servant’s posture. Whether I am doing the unglamorous job of hyperlinking affiliate products, or the delicate work of massaging the back of a laboring woman, both roles require me to think more of another party than myself. The tasks are meaningful because they call me to remember my finiteness, and to worship a God who is infinite.

This interplay between mundane and extraordinary is, of course, not exclusive to Victoria Wilson – Virtual Assistant and Birth Doula. It seems to be a common conversation these days. Culture at large talks often of how ‘extraordinary’ it is to ‘be present’. Of more value than that discourse is to see God working in the everyday to bring about His own glory and our sanctification. I am sure most of us are not strangers to the everyday and the once-in-a-lifetime. Isn’t it remarkable that God works everything, every experience, together for good? As I work and serve, I am grateful that the Lord is making use of it all. In my work, I pray that I am willing and ready to do whatever He ordains next.