The need to be needed

And the need for fun

I have a memory that has been playing on repeat on the film screen of my mind, the way memories sometimes do. I am a child—maybe 5 or 6 years old—sitting at our family’s table. Chin cupped in my hands, elbows on the table, I watch my dad, seated at the end nearest me, framed against the light from the window behind him. He is counting coins.

The coins are sorted by kind in little pools in front of him: pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. He places two fingers, index and middle, on two nickels, then drags them across the table—shwishhhsh—until they slide off the end into his other hand.

He counts quietly, under his breath. “Ten.”

His fingers slide two more of the five-cent coins. “Twenty.”

Then, “Thirty. Forty. Fifty …” and on he goes until he cradles enough nickels in his left hand to make a roll. Carefully forming the nickels into a cylinder in his palm, he reaches for a paper coin wrapper, lines the counted coins on top of it, then rolls them into a neat sausage, folding down the paper ends with his thumb to keep the tube secure.

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As a child, I loved watching my dad count coins. When all the coins were rolled and wrapped, I also watched as he tallied the totals in a ruled book with a pencil. I marvelled at his skill and efficiency. Today, I marvel at his service.

For years, he volunteered as our church’s Sunday School treasurer, weekly counting, rolling, and tallying offerings, which would have been no small task during an era when churches overflowed and Sunday School classes were bursting with young baby boomers. The task must have appealed to his orderly nature. My dad was good with numbers and finances. But as a factory worker with a wife and four kids to provide for, I am certain there would have been plenty of other ways he could have spent his time. Still, I suspect the task was life-giving for him, allowing him to tap into certain natural strengths in a way that his crane operator’s job just didn’t permit.

My mom, too, prioritized service at our church. She taught Sunday School for years, and somehow managed to find time to prepare thoughtful and creative lessons while gardening, cooking, cleaning, and sewing for her family—at a time when doing laundry alone required feeding sopping garments through the wringer washer, then hanging items one-by-one on the clothesline to dry. Teaching would have been every bit as life-giving for my mother, who loved to read and learn, in spite of the fact that she never completed high school.

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When Doug and I established our own home and family, we also felt it important to find ways to serve in and through our church community.

Over the decades, Doug held roles as an elder, Sunday School teacher, a leader in the Boys Brigade, and Young Adults, caring for the church building and grounds, and taking on plumbing repairs and various other maintenance tasks.

When we moved to Winnipeg two years ago and searched for a new home church, one of the factors that determined where we would settle was whether we could anticipate service opportunities.

Our service today looks different from in the past. With my growing awareness of Doug’s cognitive limitations over the past two years, I have tried to guide him in seeking out ways to contribute that feel both safe (for him and those around him) and also meaningful.

Currently, he finds joy in being “The Potato Man,” overseeing the distribution of potatoes to individuals and families at the biweekly community food bank and approaches the task with thoughtfulness and a grave sense of responsibility. (Once, when I asked why he always wore the same tired shirt to the food bank, he explained that it was because the people he serves there don’t have much, and he didn’t want to cause any discomfort by appearing better dressed than they were.)

Photo: Immo Wegmann, Unsplash

In his book, Theology for the Community of God, Stanley J. Grenz points out that theologians commonly summarize the ministry of the church “by appeal to three Greek terms, martyria or kerygma (witness), koinonia (fellowship), and diakonia (service).”

In other words, service is important. It is important not only for the building up of the church itself, but for the strengthening of individual believers. Service opportunities allow us to exercise our gifts and discover new ones, but they also help us to experience the reality that our contributions make a difference. At the most basic level, they enable us to see that in the community of believers, we are all needed.

One morning last week, Doug reminisced, almost wistfully, about past leadership roles he had once held in the church.

“I was an elder!” he said. “Do you think I could do that again?”

My heart ached, but “I think you’ve earned the right to take a break, hon” is all I said. It seemed enough to satisfy.

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Within hours of Doug’s wistful reminiscing, we received an invitation from our church’s Pastor for Senior Youth and Young Adults. He was planning a special event for the young people the following evening, a manhunt, during which the youth would assemble into teams and attempt to find people from the congregation, spread out through the neighbourhood.

“So, the ask is to be outside and within the marked off area from 7:15 pm–8:40 pm so the youth can find you,” the pastor wrote. “Some of those who are hunted are dressing up and hiding, others are sitting in a park reading, others might be on a patio enjoying gelato. I leave that part up to you.”

When I shared the opportunity with Doug, he was keen to participate; we once loved working with the young people at church. And so, the following evening we walked to a local patio, explained our mission to the hostess and server, and positioned ourselves directly next to the sidewalk so we would be hard to miss. We enjoyed the warm, dry evening air, the dinner jazz that wafted from patio speakers, some good food, and waited to be found.

Two teams did find us, but two others passed by within inches, without spotting us at all. Our hostess and server checked in throughout the evening for updates. And we had a blast. It was a service opportunity tailor-made for us.

The next day, when I wrote to the pastor to say so, he replied, “It is a joy to have a church that enjoys connecting and participating with the young people. It may seem a small thing … but it goes a long way towards building familiarity and comfort [for the young people] with the church community!”

Dementia takes so much. But on that day, saying “yes” to a service opportunity allowed us to make a memory—one filled with fun, joy, and laughter—and reminded us both that our days of making a meaningful contribution are not yet over.

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“The dementia-caregiving experience is to be stewarded, not endured.”

- Lizette Cloete, Think Different Dementia