In its former life, my church was an auto body shop.

It’s a huge warehouse of a building right in the heart of Humboldt Park. We’re right in front of the eastern metal Puerto Rican flag that spans across Division street.

There’s a large freight elevator inside the building that used to take cars from the first floor to the second but for the past 40 or so years has carried the congregants that we’re either too old or too young to go up and down the stairs easily.

Every service someone is stationed at the elevator to ferry to people up into the sanctuary.

For a large part of my teenage years and early 20s an older man named, Juan, manned the elevator. He was a kind man who always had a smile and a candy for you.

Usually they were Werther’s hard candies, or sometimes the ones with a chewy center.

At some point he started to forget. Where he was. Where he lived. Who people were.

He stopped coming to church. It was just him and his wife, and it was too hard for her to care for him.

My sister handed me a werther’s on Sunday and I immediately thought of him. And I remembered his small act of kindness that he offered everyone he came across; words of encouragement, a smile, and a small candy.

And I hope he at least remembered he was loved.