In Heidi’s world, theology finds a pulse: Between scrubs and scripture, a caregiver discovers her calling
At Lakeland Village residential facility in Washington, a certified nursing assistant tends to residents with developmental disabilities and discovers, in their wordless exchanges, a theology no classroom could teach
MEDICAL LAKE
On certain afternoons at Lakeland Village, when the building settles into its soft, habitual rhythm, Heidi Olmstead moves through the hallways with the particular attentiveness of someone who has learned to listen differently.
A resident hums as she passes. A colleague laughs somewhere down the corridor. Sunlight falls across the linoleum in long, unhurried stripes. To a casual observer, these are unremarkable moments. To Heidi, a certified nursing assistant and a theologian, they have become something else entirely, a kind of living commentary on the texts she studies after her shifts end.
“One of my favorite ideas in scripture comes from Romans 8:16,” she said recently, sitting in a break room at the facility. “It says that God’s spirit testifies to our spirit. From my experience, spirits can communicate with each other in unexpected ways.”
At Lakeland Village, a residential facility in eastern Washington that serves adults with developmental disabilities, that verse has become less a doctrine than a daily observation.
Heidi did not set out to find theology in a care facility. She knew, even before she took the job, that it was a practical necessity bridging her studies and the professorship she hopes one day to hold. What she did not anticipate was the degree to which the work would reshape her thinking.
The shift began with one resident in particular, a woman who does not communicate verbally, and who had been going through a prolonged difficult period.
“At first, I wondered whether the care I provide is really reaching her,” Heidi said. “But as I’ve gotten to know her, I’ve learned to recognize her cues and begin to understand what she’s trying to communicate.”
Over time, the relationship became unmistakable. Their eyes light up when they see each other. A wordless familiarity has developed between them, one that required nothing Heidi had been formally trained to recognize.
The experience has pressed against one of the more durable assumptions in certain streams of Christian theology: that rationality is the defining feature of the Imago Dei, the idea that every human being bears the image of God.
“If that were true,” Heidi said, “I wouldn’t be able to account for the dignity and relational depth I encounter every day.”
What her work has clarified, she said, is that the image of God is neither fragile nor contingent on cognitive ability. It is something more stubborn, more mysterious, and, she has found, often most legible in precisely the people who resist easy categorization.
“Every person fully bears God’s image,” she said, “even, and maybe especially, when that image isn’t easily categorized or explained.”
Heidi’s intellectual companions are not drawn exclusively from the modern academy. Among the thinkers she returns to most often is St. Gregory of Nazianzus, the fourth-century theologian and poet whose emotional intensity, she said, has always moved her.
“I love how deeply Gregory felt things, and how evident this is in his life and writings,” she said. “Yet he never stopped pursuing God or let himself get in the way. That kind of dedication, despite personal setbacks, is something I aspire to.”
Her other “old friends”, as she calls them, include St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, and the contemporary biblical scholar Preston Sprinkle, whose writing she encountered in high school and credits with shaping her early theological imagination. Aquinas and Aristotle arrived through a professor and close friend whose own thinking was steeped in their work.
If she could invite any historical figure to shadow her for a shift, she said without hesitation: St. Athanasius, the fourth-century bishop whose writings on the nature of Christ and the human person remain foundational to Christian theology.
“He was immensely dedicated to service,” she said. “I think he would learn more about what it looks like to be an image-bearer in unconventional ways, as I have.”
Heidi grew up in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where hiking and walking in open country became, early on, the texture of her spiritual life. The landscape of eastern Washington, its trails, its pine-lined horizons, the wide calm around Medical Lake, has offered something similar.
“In the quiet of nature, I feel God’s presence acutely,” she said. “I’m grateful that there’s so much natural beauty in and around Spokane.”
Between shifts, she walks. She reads, currently working through ‘Butter’ a novel by the Japanese writer Asako Yuzuki, following recent reads of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and a missionary memoir by Elinor Young. She prays, practicing what she describes as continuous prayer: the discipline of turning quiet moments, rather than filling them with noise, into brief points of contact with God.
“I’m relearning how to do that,” she said. “It’s something I’m still figuring out.”
Her long-term ambition is not a solitary lectern but something closer to a seminar table.
“My favorite moments in class were when the professor guided us to an insight but let us feel like we discovered it ourselves,” she said. “I want to enable my students to have that realization that they are capable of discovery and learning on their own.”
If she could dismantle one theological misconception from the front of a classroom, she said, it would be the widespread belief that the Christian life is fundamentally oriented toward “getting to Heaven.”
“Heaven is not the end goal,” she said. “The goal is to become like Christ and enjoy his presence forever in the new, on a renewed earth as well as a new Heaven. The goal isn’t us or our desires. It’s him.”
She believes the patience she is learning now, in the slow and exacting work of caregiving, will prove essential to the teacher she hopes to become.
“All aspects of our lives are interwoven,” she said. “We are the common thread.”
To other young women who find themselves suspended between a present job and a future calling, who feel the pull of a vocation they cannot yet reach, Heidi speaks with a candor that does not minimize the difficulty.
“This season has been beautiful, but it has also been immensely difficult,” she said. “I won’t deny the struggles and the burnout that waiting can cause.”
She thought for a moment before continuing.
“But God is faithful. He can bear the weight of your hopes and disappointments. He can bear the weight of your silence and your tears.”
She paused again.
“Just because God is saying ‘wait’ doesn’t mean he’s saying ‘no.’ It’s not my job to know how long this season will last. It’s my job to seek God in the waiting.”
Back on the floor at Lakeland Village, the afternoon wears on. Heidi finishes her rounds, attends to the small, necessary tasks that constitute a shift, and prepares to go home.
She will walk, perhaps. She will read. She will return tomorrow and do it again.
And in the meantime, in those ordinary exchanges — a glance across a room, a gesture understood without translation, two people recognizing each other — she continues to find the theology she hopes, one day, to teach.
Lakeland Village is a residential facility operated by Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services, providing residential care and support services to adults with developmental disabilities.