Dear Inner Circle,
What is the value in being good for nothing?
This week I asked a dear friend, one of our community members, to tell me about the volunteers who had mattered to her. I wasn’t prepared for what came back.
She sent me a small archive. Story after story, written out carefully — she even apologised for the grammar, which was fine — of moments that, taken individually, might look like nothing much. A cushion recovered and re-covered. A little bag of moisturiser sachets set aside week after week. A shopping list. Twenty free hot drinks on a cold morning. A $20 note pressed into a hand with the words, I know what you’re thinking.
None of it was what the volunteers were there to do. None of it was in the job description.
The woman who noticed which skincare brands she preferred, who quietly saved sachets and bottles as donations came in wasn’t solving a big problem. She was just paying attention – across years. That kind of attention is its own form of love, and love, it turns out, accumulates. My friend still thinks about that little bag of sachets.
There was a volunteer who didn’t smoke. Before every shift, he would stop at the horseshoe, hand around a full pack of cigarettes and say, “I have to start work now, but have a smoke for me.” It wasn’t charity in any formal sense. It was a man finding a way to give something of himself that existed entirely outside his role. A personal gift, freely offered, to people he had simply chosen to love. The cigarettes almost weren’t the point. The point was that he had thought of them before he walked through the door.
One story stopped me completely. A volunteer received news while on her shift that her mother had died. My friend saw she was upset, asked what was wrong, and when she heard, said: “Go home. Hold her hand. Tell her you love her. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” The volunteer went. Two weeks later she came back and pressed an envelope into my friend’s hands, labelled in the mother’s handwriting: housie money. She wanted it split among people who frequent our café. My friend split the money and handed the empty envelope back, “Keep it. It’s got your dear mum’s handwriting on it.”
She then added: “Oh, I just realised that’s a good story about me, not her. Sorry!”
She’s wrong. It’s a story about both of them. It’s a story about what happens when a person who is supposed to be serving another stops keeping score of who is serving whom and even who is supposed to be serving whom.
That, I think, is the answer to the question that started this. The value in being good for nothing, in offering what isn’t required, won’t be measured, and what exists entirely outside the transaction. Simone Weil once observed that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity and recognition. For someone who has spent years feeling invisible, it’s everything.
There is something majestic when people show up to be good for nothing amongst some who’ve been made to feel for like they’re good for nothing.
Our volunteers have been doing this for a long time, some of them for more than 1,000 hours over decades. Quietly, persistently, loving through attention, giving without needing to know it mattered.
It mattered. It always does.
Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle,
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel
