Of chairs and Jesus

 

Meet Ruben; tall, wearing jeans and an old army jacket, longish messy brown hair in which he sometimes wears a kerchief tied like a headband. Ruben is a nice looking young man when he actually looks straight at you—his eyes are a startling bright blue-green, and you only notice the tattoos above his eyebrows when he lifts his hair with his hands. He has a beard and mustache and he moves a LOT; restlessly touching and counting things, moving away from people…Ruben has some mental health issues, among them OCD and anxiety. But when he smiles, it lights up the room and he has been known to play the guitar for all of us at Hope House. As he backs into the intake room, I know some of the staff are watching him cautiously.

Ruben is one of many clients we have with mental health issues, and in the last few weeks, we have had some problems with some of them escalating and getting loud and disruptive in Hope House. This issue has been weighing on me, and I have spent much time in prayer about it. It is such a fine line to walk; to reach out and help those in need, while still keeping everyone safe and comfortable. After all, Jesus hung out with the mentally ill and homeless all the time (more on that later in this blog). So my new idea is to treat these clients as “normal” (whatever that is) and give them clear expectations of behavior while in Hope House. Thursday was my first chance to try this, which worked out perfectly since I was doing intake. Here’s how it went;

·       Vicky, an extremely disruptive client who is schizophrenic, came in for assistance. I greeted her warmly, told her she looked good and asked how we could help her today. When she requested housing help (something we don’t do), I was afraid she would be upset at not getting it, but to my surprise, she was fine with a referral and some warm clothing.

·       D.T., a very large homeless man with anger issues, came in wrapped in a blanket looking for clothing and food. We spent a few minutes talking about his late girlfriend, who passed away last year. After shedding a few tears, he went and shopped and left with no trouble.

·       Ann, a single mom with depression and anxiety, came in and sat with me for about 15 minutes, chatting about her life and her boys. She thanked me for taking time to just listen.

So by keeping my mood positive and firm, I was able to help these clients have pleasant shopping experiences. How I see my clients is as part of the Body of Christ, and if I always remember that, we will get along much better. I know we are all part of Christ, but I’m pretty sure that Jesus visited us at Hope House today—actually visited, not just as one of His people, but here in disguise as one of His people.

So back to Ruben: here is how his shopping went. When he was ready to get hygiene, there were too many people in that area for him. I found him in a corner of the waiting room and asked him if he was alright. He replied “yes, I’m fine, but there are too many people over there, so I’ll wait here.” A very  smart coping skill, if you ask me. Later, he seemed rooted to the waiting room (where he was rearranging and counting our chairs) and unable to continue shopping, so I stood by the kitchen door and called out his choices to him while he picked what he needed—all while moving chairs around. We packed his choices up for him and he proceeded to fidget around in the waiting room until almost time to close, at which point I warned him we would close in 10 minutes. As the last client went out the door, I said “ok, Ruben time to go”. He was actually sitting quietly reading a book at this point and he stood up and handed it to me and shouldered his bag. I told him he could take the book if he wanted. He looked straight in my eyes, gave me a small smile and said “thanks, but I’ve already read it”. As he went out the door, I looked down at the book in my hands—it was the Bible.

I’ m just saying…..sometimes He visits in person.

The Circle of Life

Often, my clients will say “when things get better, when I get a job, when I finish school then I will give back to Hope House”. Many of our clients bring in donations of used clothing as their children outgrow them, or bits and pieces of household items they no longer need. We even have some single men who will use their meager food stamps to buy food for our Food Pantry!

 

The clients who tear at my heart are those men who cannot look up because they are so ashamed of having to ask for help. They usually speak in quiet voices full of pain and bewilderment, about having never had to ask for help in their lives. Also painful are the women who have had their lives torn apart by domestic violence or abandonment: they have no idea how to start over and what happened to their life.

 

What do these two paragraphs have in common? They both speak to my personal philosophy of how and why we do what we do at Hope House—I call it the Circle of Life (I know that’s already taken, but who cares?). My Circle of Life means we are all accountable to God for each other. We are part of the same family of God and we should be helping each other all the way through life. If we don’t, how are we going to be able to get through it? We are called to be God to one another, so it doesn’t matter where we are on the circle—giving or receiving—we are all on the circle (the journey we call life) together. I tell my clients we are here to help each other and they can help when it is their turn.

Right now I am just riding the circle through life!

Hugs from Emma...

Emma is two years old; she has beautiful long brown hair and fair skin. Her eyes are big and brown and slightly slanted—Emma has Down’s syndrome. Her smile can light up the world and is so pure and freely given that I would term it to be Grace in its most breathtaking form. So you can imagine how wonderful it is to not only get a smile from Emma, but a leaning in, “I trust you” hug offered shyly and quietly while I sit at my desk! Pure joy is what it gave me, as if God has sent an angel to me personally for encouragement. How blessed am I!

Emma is one of many such precious children we serve at Hope House and a huge reason most of us work there. The opportunity to serve these smallest of His people is not to be missed. In discussions of social justice, social service reductions and responsibility issues; what is left is that many of the adults we are trying to teach and hold accountable are parents of these precious angels. When we cut services to adults, we often leave children out in the cold as well. Somehow, we need to make allowances and learn to teach adults without punishing their children with them.

It’s a fine line and I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I hope we can start the dialogue in an attitude of love and respect. Perhaps our wonderful new Pope, known for his concern for the poor, can be a guide for our Churches outreach.

In the meantime, I’ll keep my door open for hugs from Emma!

Where are you, God?

It’s been a couple of months since I have blogged, and I will be honest with you—it has been a rough couple of months. There is no good reason for it to have been that way—just one of those periods when what we do everyday at Hope House sometimes seems futile in the grand scheme of global poverty and “man’s inhumanity to man”. So I go to work, plod through the day with a less than invested attitude and feel lost from the real reason I am here.

Those of you who have followed my blogging in the past know that I have frequent “conversations” with God. Not so much lately, which makes it difficult to reach out to my clients with the agape love I usually feel. So I wonder—where are you, Lord?

Ok, so I just took a break to help with intake and He pretty much screamed in my ear to let me know He is here. I just checked in a couple with three small children, including a beautiful newborn baby girl, who are in need of any help they can get. Their water has been shut off; he has been unable to get a job, even though he is a HVAC worker and has applied for over 200 jobs of any kind. He is hoping an interview he has tomorrow will be the one. In meantime, they are desperate for help today. I am able to provide them with diapers, food, hygiene items and clothing today. I am also able to give them resources for their water bill—we should be able to get it back on by the end of the week. This made me feel like things are looking up—warmth in my heart!

Then, I go back to the kitchen area, where the volunteers tell me we were out of toilet paper (one of our most requested items)—then, someone came in the back door with a Costco sized package as a donation! We call that a “God-shot”!

To top it all off, a woman comes by, asks me what we need, and leaves. She returns 20 minutes later with two bags of diapers and formula, and a nice sized check. Sometimes God laughs when I write ……

Sometimes He just yells at me.

Shoes, science and God

So it was a busy Monday morning—usual for Hope House, chaos, lots of needs, lots of people. Gray skies and rain completed a fairly bleak picture. Add to this the fact that I am getting over a cold and low on energy and what you get is someone who really is questioning why she is at Hope House today!

So, as so often in my life, God likes to remind me of why I am here and where my place is. Being sick or tired is no excuse for me to sleepwalk through a chance to serve in His name. Paying attention to the small things is a valuable lesson in faith for me. Case in point:

Darlene is a long time client, a single mom who struggles to educate and feed her 4 children on her own. She is well educated herself, but life has had some not so great twists and turns for her. She has never abandoned her faith, though, always trusting God to keep her close. Today as I returned from a run out to the store for supplies for distribution, Darlene caught me in the parking lot to tell me her witness of the New Year.

“My resolution this year was to trust God more” she said to me with a smile. “Today I came here hoping to find some things I need, and guess what! I found them all.”

Here is how God helped Hope House help Darlene today:

• Darlene found her hard to find shoe size, enabling her to stop wearing her teenage son’s size 12’s!

• She also found a coat to replace the one that she had to throw away because it was worn and torn.

• She and her 10 year old son decided last night that he would enter the Science Fair at his school and she found a book called “101 Science Experiments for Science Fairs”.

• Her 4 year old daughter just started gymnastics and they found a leotard for her.

Meeting the needs of our clients where they are is our primary goal at Hope House. Learning to trust God and increasing our own faith is just an extra added bonus!

The Face of God

A few years ago, there was a television show I loved to watch each week. The concept was intriguing and thought provoking and each week, I felt I learned something (or at the least, had my thoughts pushed in new directions). The name of the show was “Joan of Arcadia”, a cute (?) take on Joan of Arc. The premise of the show was that God talked to this young teenage girl through the people she met in her daily life. Sometimes it was a bus driver, sometimes the janitor at her high school or a homeless teenage girl she met on the bus. Once it was even a little girl, who spoke clearly to Joan about whatever moral issue she was dealing with that week. God helped her to see who needed help, how to help them, or just how to sit up and notice other people. I loved the idea of God speaking through random human beings at random times about life.

In real life, working at Hope House has increased my faith exponentially and the giving I receive from my clients has helped me to understand a radical concept. Are you ready? Because sometimes I think my views are “radical” to some—anyway, here goes:

“I have met God face to face!”

Wow! Yes, I am still here—no lightening struck, I am not blind and God has not forsaken me (at least, He hasn’t told me He has!). Radical or not, this statement is perfectly true, both for me and for all of you. The truth is we meet God everyday in the faces of those we interact with (heck, we meet Him even when we don’t interact with someone---which is why we should all pay closer attention to each other, but that’s another blog). We are all part of the Body of Christ, we are all members of the family of mankind and we are all fellow travelers on this journey we call life. So let me introduce you to some of the faces God has shown to me:

·       A newborn baby girl, sweetly sleeping in her mother’s arms.

·       A 3 year old boy, peering around my office door, offering a “fist bump” and a grin.

·       A pregnant teenage girl, face showing both fear and wonder.

·       An exhausted young single mom, carrying one child and holding the other tightly by the hand.

·       A migrant worker, hands stained purple from the raspberries he was picking all week.

·       A homeless teenage boy with three tattoos and 4 piercings.

·       A bewildered middle aged father who has never not had a job—until now.

·       A mentally ill, confused and difficult young woman.

·       A grizzled, smoky smelling homeless vet, grateful for a hot cup of coffee and some dry socks.

·       An elderly widow, leaning heavily on her walker.

·       A young disabled man in a wheelchair, unable to communicate clearly to the world.

These are the faces of God I meet—all of them with one common trait—they are all God in disguise. How would you treat Him if He presented himself to you in need? Perhaps in a less than attractive body or personality? If we believe we are called to be Christ present to each other here on earth, where and with whom do you draw the line?

How many times have you met God today?

 

St. Peter is watching you.

On walks through the cemetery, or even our church garden, I often admire the beautiful statues erected in memory of a loved one. Angels seem to be a popular theme, and in our church garden is a beautiful statue of the Blessed Mother, in memory of a lovely woman I remember fondly.

If I would have a statue in my honor or on my grave, I would pick St. Peter. Why Peter, you might ask? The answer is simple, as simple as the man who loved Christ so much and trusted Him so much that he actually stepped out of a boat onto the water with Him! From what we know about the disciples, Peter was most often right out in front, asking questions, swinging swords and yes, denying Christ. However, I don’t believe any of the disciples loved our Lord more than Peter and I think Christ knew that when he put Peter in charge of His church. Jesus knew Peter would work hard, keep things and people together and lead with common sense and compassion. I identify with him because I see a lot of the same characteristics in the two of us: hard workers, hands on workers, passionate about what we do, speaking without always thinking first, and not always as patient as we should be.

So all of this is leading up to me speaking out without patience and with passion on a subject that has me a little riled up.

It recently came to my attention that some in our congregation are “uncomfortable” with the lines of people waiting outside our gym on the last Sunday of each month for a free Community Meal. While this meal has nothing to do with Hope House, I often see looks slanted towards our clients waiting in line on weekday mornings for diapers and clothing. Same looks, same attitude, same people. So here I go—St. Peter be with me!

Did these people go to the same Mass I did? Did they receive the Body of Christ? Of course they did. So why after receiving our Lord and His grace in one space, do they feel it is ok to be “uncomfortable” with other members of the Body of Christ waiting patiently for a free meal? The people in line are poor—they are not criminals, they are not gang members, they are not here to hurt anyone, they would appreciate a smile and a word of welcome. Does anyone think it is easy to stand in line for free food? Do any of you think most of them would rather be home cooking their own meal? These are your neighbors, part of our community, and human beings in this world of ours. Times are tough, or haven't you heard?

I would ask that you take a moment next time you see this line or when you see clients outside of Hope House and just say Hi and smile and make eye contact. You may find out how very nice “these people” are!

Don’t make me send St. Peter to lecture you!