The Importance of Being Needed
Virginia, known to most people in Westside neighborhood of Austin as Cookie, could not keep from smiling as she walked home from Spencer elementary school with a packet full of papers. These papers had been given to her by the school requesting that she become a regular volunteer for the third grade classroom. Cookie is fifty-eight years old with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, the victim of multiple accounts of physical abuse, has been unemployed for over a decade and is one of the most well known and loved person in the neighborhood. Cookie has never felt very useful or had a sense of purpose. But on the day when the school asked HER to be a permanent volunteer she knew she had found her purpose.
At eleven o’clock on Thanksgiving night I heard a loud knock at my door. It was Cookie standing there in the cold with the biggest smile I had ever seen on her face. She just had to tell me her news, she had tried two other times but I had not been home. She told me the story of how she accompanied her niece’s son to school one day because he was having so many discipline problems in his classroom. She stayed with him for the day and the teacher was delighted at the difference it made. After talking with the principal the teacher then asked Cookie if she would be a regular volunteer in the classroom and gave her some papers to fill out. Standing at my door Cookie announces that she now has a reason to get up in the morning, she now has a purpose. I hugged and congratulated her seeing first-hand the importance of being needed. Cookie has been on the receiving end of the “need equation” for most of her life, now was a time for her to be the solution to a need.
As I said goodbye to Cookie that evening I was extremely honored that she had such a strong desire to tell me her news. She did not want to tell me her good news because she knew I was a pastor or because I could have anything to do with her volunteering. She wanted to tell me because we had spent hours talking and sharing together, she wanted to tell me because I am her neighbor.