I worked at a retirement home last year. It was the kind of retirement home in line with the Canadian Dream (aka The American Dream, but Canadian-style, with hockey talk and lots of dry wit) and was affectionately called, “a cruise ship that doesn’t go anywhere”. This retirement home had it all – beautiful suites, three prepared meals a day, planned activities and outings, building security and emergency help with just the push of a button. The irony of my employment there didn’t hit me until I was a few weeks into the job. But when it hit, it hit me square in the heart.

You see, exactly a year before, I was living in New Delhi, India, befriending slum children. I was no longer reading about them or studying them from a distance – I was talking to them and hugging them and thinking and praying intently about how I could help them. These ragamuffin children and their families captured my heart from the beginning. They were poor, hungry, cold (December and January in North India is freezing!) and many were abused and neglected. Their immediate needs were obvious – a growling stomach speaks louder than words – and I was there to help meet their needs, on a variety of different levels, in a variety of different ways. As I walked the streets of New Delhi and even now as I think about it, I knew exactly what I wanted to do and the person I wanted to be. I wanted to serve the orphans and the widows, the “poorest of the poor”, and I was ready to give all I could, to be, as we say, “the hands and feet of Jesus”.  I wanted to be that person.

Then life and illness happened and I found myself not in India, but back in Canada where the landscape of people and social problems looked completely different.  After an eight-month recovery, there I found myself, working at retirement home in Vancouver, answering questions about what was on the dinner menu or what time the Rummikub tournament started. I was serving people who paid more money for a month of rent than some people in India would have in their entire lifetime. I quickly realized – this was not the person I wanted to be; these were not the people I wanted to serve. I began to resent contributing to a system of so much waste and “first-world problems” when there were people dying on the streets of New Delhi. 

If you’ve travelled to a developing country before, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

How short-sighted our hearts can be.

A few weeks after starting my job there, I had an epiphany of sorts when I was getting ready for work one day. I was angrily mulling these things over in my heart once again and telling Jesus about them – telling Him how it was because I wasn’t sure He knew – and suddenly I felt the tug of His Spirit. 

“Steph, what do they need?” 

“I don’t know what they need! They have everything! They are rich senior citizens living it up in the eleventh hour of their lives!”

“Steph, what do they need?”

“They don’t need anything! Most of them know You and follow You. They’ve got it together!”

“Steph, what do they need?” 

And then I stopped responding because suddenly I realized that I was seeing these people with my own two eyes and not the eyes of my Father. Their Father. Our Father. And then our Father graciously and gently gave me a wee peak into my heart and I saw my arrogance, self-righteousness, disappointment and compassion and love, too. It was a messy conglomeration of various parts of me swimming together, so intertwined that I could not separate the redeemed from the yet-to-be-redeemed. So I forgot about the rich and poor people of the world for a moment and instead looked inside at my own rich and poor. The poverty and opulence in my heart, living together side by side as neighbours do, just seconds away from dying of starvation and living in abundance, all at the same time, in the same yard, at the same dinner table. I realized then that my employment situation was not ironic at all – that God had very purposefully placed me at this retirement home to teach me a very important lesson: 

Every person has a need.

We’re all little creatures – little creations – who may wear different kinds of clothes and live in different kinds of buildings (or no building at all) and drive different kinds of cars (or no car at all) but, if we can be so liberated to look past the weary, one-dimensional edges of these things for just a moment, or God-willing for much longer, we can see that delicately resting underneath our skin and bones are things that we creatures all share in common – a soul, a spirit, a thirst for knowledge and adventure and wholeness, a voice, a heart, and an insatiable longing to be home – with each other and with our Creator.  We make thing too complicated sometimes, as if we need to sophisticate our lives so that we can cover up the fact that we are not sophisticated at all. The truth is, we are breathing next to each other, giving and receiving from each other and, if we so choose, seeing into each other – rich or poor or both at the same time – and reaching out to each other with whatever we can in hand and in heart, hoping desperately it all finds a place to land; we find a place to land.

If it’s true that we’re all on mission no matter where we live in the world, and I believe it is, then I needed to start listening and looking for the needs of the people that lived at the “cruise ship that doesn’t go anywhere.” I started asking Jesus to open up my eyes to see what He saw and to give me courage to act or speak or do nothing. This was my part to play in the story. My part wasn’t to direct my steps to a particular country or people or to define what “the poorest of the poor” meant from my small perspective, but rather to just be where He placed me, and in that place to ask that simple, life-changing question: 

“What do they need?”

“What do they need?” I asked while driving to work. “What do they need?” I asked as I listened intently to a woman complaining about how dry and tasteless the chicken at dinner was that evening. “What do they need?” I asked as I plunged toilets and cleaned poop out of the bird cage. “What do they need?” I asked as I listened to dear Mary* tell me the same story over and over again, her beautiful rambling slowly revealing her dementia. “What do they need?” I asked as I played Rummikub with the ladies at night and playfully accused Beverly of cheating (she didn’t, but I was losing.) “What do they need?” I asked as I sat on the floor next to Gwen, a 96 year old woman who had just fallen and broken her hip. “What do they need?” I asked as I prayed with Barbara on her way to the hospital, unsure if I would ever see her again. “What do they need?” I asked as I heard the news that Carl, a man I had finally had my first conversation with the night before, died the morning after (surely I didn’t talk him to death?). “What do they need?” I asked.

What do you need? What do I need?

Why did I listen to someone complaining about dry chicken, especially when there are people in India (and many other places around the world) dying of starvation? Because after the dry chicken complaint was given, we talked about what she used to cook for dinner when she owned her own house, and then conversation turned to stories of her husband and kids and grandkids, and ended with how much she missed her husband, who had passed away ten years prior. Her loneliness reached out to my own and, for just a little while, we became companions on the same road. I listened and hugged her and cried with her and assured her that she would see him again, someday. I told her that there was still purpose for her being here, and that she was still needed by others. She thanked me for taking the time to listen, and I thanked her for sharing her stories with me. As she wheeled her walker away, I thought:

That is what she needed.

That is what I needed, too.

And I went back to cleaning poop out of the bird cage.

I worked at the retirement home for only eight months, but those eight months were so rich, I really couldn’t have asked for anything more. The beautiful mystery of giving and receiving was, in those months, incredibly healing to my fragile state and to their fragile states as well. We welcomed each other in, not because we wore certain clothes or lived in certain houses, but because we all needed something, and we at least understood that much about each other. What that something was, was ours to discover…

It is wherever we are.

* All names have been changed to protect the elderly.

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© Stephanie Ratcliff and stephanieratcliff.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Stephanie Ratcliff and stephanieratcliff.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net.