I was trying to display a count of all online users on my website, and installed the [meteor-user-status](https://github.com/mizzao/meteor-user-status) plugin to help with this. I thought all I had to do was add a template helper

```
Template.header.helpers({
    numOnline: Meteor.users.find({"status.online":true}).count()
});

```

like so, and include the {{numOnline}} variable in my header template. But, for some reason, that resulted in always displaying 0 users online. However, when I simply ran the method Meteor.users.find({"status.online":true}).count() in the javascript console, it gave the correct amount of users online.

After messing around with it a bit, I got it to work by wrapping it in a function:

```
Template.header.helpers({
    numOnline: function(){
        return Meteor.users.find({"status.online":true}).count();
    }
});

```

This change makes it work perfectly, but I have no clue why. Can someone explain why it was necessary to wrap it in a function?