Category: Word on the Street

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How our Neighbors Lead Us

#Loveyourneighbor

On January 17, 2021, Street Church gathered on a cold January morning and celebrated its first baptism of our friend, Sue. It was a joyous occasion, one that will forever live in this pastor’s mind as a mountaintop moment of faith. On this day, Sue professed her faith and joined the family of Christ. Over the last year, she has showed up week after week to share her gifts living into the commitment she made on that day.

Through her spiritual gift of hospitality, and her love language of baking, she has blessed us immensely with birthday cakes, pastries, and other goodies throughout the year. Often, she serves as a liturgist reading our scriptures and prayers, sharing her voice with the congregation. Sue also does behind-the-scenes work for Street Church, helping to coordinate bus rides to services. She has cared for her community by sharing what she has, and she is an exemplary model of what it means to show up as a disciple of Christ for the church and the community.

"Bear," another one of our lay ministers in the community, shows up weekly at 8:30 AM to open up the doors of the church. Every Sunday, he gets the coffee started and makes sure the lights and the heat is on. He is the first person the meal groups see when they prepare meals for Sunday morning, and he is the last one to leave the building each Sunday. "Bear" has grown over the last year, as he has learned what it means to lead for the sake of Christ who is at work in us. As one of the original neighbors to help us gather folks around scripture, he is an example of the way that we grow from one spark to a flame.

While this past year has brought a lot of loss for our neighbors, some have used that grief as a motivation for change.

Our friends Chris and George have overcome so many struggles. Yet, they have remained active in our ministry, ensuring that the worship service flows smoothly with setup and tear down. Despite their struggles, they used the legacy of friends lost as a motivation to transform their own lives and work towards sobriety. It has not been an easy battle, but one that has brought them to a place where their leadership shined during the surprise winter storm last week. It was those two who made it possible, at a time when roads were impassible for many staff and volunteers, to opening up the Day Center to make sure that folks would be cared for during the impactful snowfall.

George even stepped in when a couple, whose tent was smashed by a tree, needed a ride to a nearby hotel where we were providing shelter. We panicked for a minute, as he was low on gas and, of all times, we couldn’t find a gas card in the whole building!

Luckily, we had Sunday’s Street Church offering on hand, and there was money available to help George with what he needed to safely transport them.

Recently, Chris has also been using his gifts to lead our neighborhood outreach mission. He has big visions for connecting with neighbors and helping them know that Christ is with them through his presence and resourcing in the neighborhood.

Both men have come so far and God will continue to use them to lead us ahead.

There are many other neighborhood examples of those who have come though the trenches and risen above the noise. I had the opportunity to take one of our friends, Marvin, out to lunch for his birthday, where he shared with me his hopes for this upcoming year. This was such a big deal for him, considering where he was just a year ago when I met him. Rachel has mourned deeply for close to a year after the tragic loss she faced. Regardless, she and her significant other have persevered with their start-up called H.O.P.E Cleaning. Rachel also hopes to help us start a Micah Street Church women’s ministry in the new year, starting with "Gal-entines Day 2022."

Advent 2021 was a brilliant display of how our community has grown since last year. We showcased the FXBG Street Choir at "A Street Church Christmas" in Market Square and joined our community in song as we kicked off the holiday season. We shared in a communal lament when we honored the 31 lives we have lost this year in our community as we held a neighborhood vigil for Homeless Person’s Memorial Day. On Christmas Eve we celebrated the joy of the season as we brought the nativity story to life and rejoiced in Christ’s birth among us.

The beautiful thing about this community is that as we continue to let our neighbors lead us, we see God in the ways that they are showing up for one another. As we gather, sow, and grow, the spark is lit just a little further as they teach the community what it means to lead by example. Their experiences have shaped them in a way that gives them a unique perspective and gifts to serve.

This past Sunday we celebrated another baptism and I can’t wait to see what story God is writing for our neighbor who has recently "joined the family," and how God will lead through her next…

The beautiful thing about this community is that as we continue to let our neighbors lead us, we see God in the ways that they are showing up for one another. As we gather, sow, and grow, the spark is lit just a little further as they teach the community what it means to lead by example. Their experiences have shaped them in a way that gives them a unique perspective and gifts to serve.

This past Sunday we celebrated another baptism and I can’t wait to see what story God is writing for our neighbor who has recently "joined the family," and how God will lead through her next…

Chelsea Morse

Community Ministry Chaplain

Micah Street Church

chelsea

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Painting of Jeremiah at the Visitor’s Center by Judy Lowman

The Liminal Space

#Loveyourneighbor

I stopped three times before I finally found a shop still serving coffee last Christmas.

Notably, it was late in the evening when I chose to venture out after our family dinner. I had an important visit to make, and it was far too cold to show up without coffee.

My friend was in his usual spot, perched on a couple pieces of cardboard under the Galleria overhang. Nothing but the twinkling lights of downtown Fredericksburg spoke into that quiet winter evening, as we sat and sipped our coffee in silence. Not traffic, pedestrians or typical city noises pierced that lonely Christmas night.

“You know, tonight would be a really good night to go indoors,” I finally interrupted.

“Oh,” he chuckled. “I’m ok. I’m ok.”

We sat longer together, few words exchanged.

As I got up to go, I left him with the same offer many of us had given each night for the previous six months.

“There’s an apartment waiting for you Jeremiah. We all love you, and we hate that you are outside, especially on Christmas” I said. “I’ll take you there whenever you are ready to go.”

He nodded kindly and went back to carrying on with the voices in his mind.

I left without him that night, as I had many other nights since our ministry committed to renting a place and working as long as it took to get him in it.

It wasn’t exactly a surprise that he would turn me down. Our efforts to build relationship with Jeremiah, to care for him and get him back into housing had gone on for 27 years.

Somewhere in between his graduation from North Stafford High School in 1989 and the day he showed up homeless on the streets of Fredericksburg, he joined the army, served in Germany and changed his name three to four times.

While the surrounding details are largely missing with regard to the actual circumstances that brought Jeremiah to the street, his time outdoors and presence downtown made him a regular legend in our community. No matter how many people our ministry had shepherded off the street and lives we had seen restored, Jeremiah was always the one people wanted to know, “what we were going to do about.”

Years ago, it took many months of hiding lunches in a dumpster for him to trust the churches enough to attend a community meal. It took a lot of creativity to navigate him through the complex systems that issue identification, medical insurance and disability income. Likewise, getting him back into housing and engaged with appropriate support would be no small task.

Then, on the eve of an oncoming snowstorm, at a time when pandemic made congregate shelter an impossible offer, there was the night that he said “Yes.” He would go with me to sleep indoors at the apartment that had been waiting for him.

It was a little more than a month after my Christmas visit. It was my turn again to check in on our friend. Admittedly, I was quite exhausted from the day’s events. Fully expecting the same rejection, I almost didn’t stop. But on the slim chance my friend might choose a warm, dry bed vs. the snow on the way, I went anyway.

I found Jeremiah and about five others at the visitor’s center. He turned me down immediately and I went over to talk to the others for a few moments.

“Are you sure you won’t come with me,” I said once more before I left.

“Where exactly is it,” he said. I described the location as I tried to control the heart beats that had then leapt into my throat.

“Ok. I’d like to give it a try,” he said.

Jeremiah would help me make his bed that night. He would wake the next morning on his own time, not when the plow trucks rolled down Caroline St; and he would watch the snow fall through a window. Weeks later he would shovel his own sidewalk, wash his own laundry and wheel his trash to the curb.

Spring would come. He would help his neighbor mow the grass and his case manager to hang a bird house in the back yard. He would walk to the corner store and return. He would heat his own meals and tend to his own room.

And this Christmas, he would greet carolers at his door and share table and season’s blessings with those who have loved him.

Jeremiah will have been home for twelve full months in just a few more weeks.

In a year that has struck us so profoundly with the deaths of 31 current and formerly homeless neighbors, victories like Jeremiah’s remind us that God’s work is less about the keys we distribute, the services we provide and the people we “fix.” It is more about how we join the holy spirit within the liminal space, the wilderness, in which our neighbors find themselves.

Author and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr explains liminal space as the time between stages of life. It is a place of transition, waiting and not knowing.

“It is where we are betwixt and between the familiar and completely unknown,” he says. “This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed. If we don’t encounter liminal space in our lives, we start idealizing normalcy.”

While the space between is brief for some, and a lifetime for others, our wildernesses always make it difficult to see God most clearly.

Between is a frightening place to be.

Knowing that God chose to take on human form and dwell among us, however, frees us from our restlessness and invites us to a place of comfort in the unknown and excitement of what is to come.

The message version of John 1: 1-18 says, “The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood…. No one has ever seen God, not so much as a glimpse. This one of a kind God expression..has made him plain as day.”

As lovers of God and lovers of neighbor, this passage calls us to be more than a tourist in the lives of people who are different from us. As God through the human form of Christ “pitched a tent” alongside us, learned our language, and came to be fully part of the world in which we live, might we embrace that example as we seek to love our neighbor more in 2022.

Happy New Year!

“The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood….

No one has ever seen God, not so much as a glimpse. This one of a kind God expression..has made him plain as day.”

John 1: 1-18

Join our Team

Looking for an opportunity to literally end homelessness for neighbors moving off the street or our of shelters and into housing? Our community needs someone with tenant agent skills to build relationships with landlords, find units and help move people into safe and stable homes. APPLY NOW to be our community’s housing locator.

“What does it mean to be the Church?” I asked our small group of dedicated leaders. We decided to hold our “community forum” the last Sunday of the month after church to discuss the business of the church and the places we want to grow in and glean from as a new faith community. Together, about 15 folks from our worshipping community gathered after our Street Church worship service one breezy September afternoon to ask, “what does it mean to us, to be the Church?”

As we gathered together, I gave each member of our community a post-it to put on a board and asked them, “Write down on your post-it: What has the Street Church Community meant to you?”

I hear a collective chatter amongst them, as they share their reflections and then, one by one responses, came forward. Words like, “relief,” “help,” “respite,” “sanctuary,” “foundation,” “safety,” and “[a place for] unity” filled the page.

Honestly, I was touched by their responses. As their Pastor, I want to make sure that they feel welcomed in the house (or in our case, yard) of God. My goal from day one has been to make them feel like they are coming, “home” to God’s house; if we can do that, then we know the Spirit is here. Seeing their responses reminded me that this special place, our little rag-tag church, had not only found a place to worship, but they found a sanctuary where they could feel safe and lay a firm foundation in Christ…right in the backyard of Fredericksburg.

When we were started to dream about what it meant to be “Street Church,” we had spent a lot of time in the parable of the sower (Matthew 13:1-9). I remember making the connection that it was God who sows the seed, but we have to be tillers of the spiritual soil to make sure that the seeds God would lay in our path could grow. Suddenly, the words “Gather, Sow, Grow” came to me from a still place in my own spirit. I knew it was God touching my heart and giving me a visual cue of what this community could root itself in. Since then, it has been the tag-line of our community, and it helps me be intentional in the various branches of our ministry.

One-by-one, I asked them, “What does it mean to you to ‘gather,’ to ‘sow’ and to ‘grow’ as a community?" They filled out their post-its and we discussed what it means to be a church who gathers, who sows seeds of discipleship, and who grows in Christian maturity together. Below is a word cloud of all of their responses. As you can see, the complete themes started to bubble up in font size, depending on how many times the word showed up. The word “blessing” stands out to me as the main focus of this community, a “blessing” to others and a blessing to this community.

As we were discussing what it meant to be a community, one member raised his hand. “Pastor Chelsea, I’m concerned that we have some folks in our community that don’t understand the expectations of what it means to be at church and to behave accordingly.”

This was a member of our community who had experienced homelessness, himself. I was surprised by his critical reflection of the community. I wondered if he was alone in his thinking. Suddenly, others spoke up and shared that they too struggled with those who spoke out of turn or were not respectful during the service. In my world, not experiencing homelessness, I didn’t have high expectations for what they would expect from church or each other. Yet, here was our church, who had higher expectations of their community and certain ideals about what it meant to be in “God’s house” despite my constant invitation to “come as you are.”

I realized that this commentary was not new for the Church. Since the early apostolic movement, Jesus followers have been trying to figure out what it means to be a living body of Christ. Paul spent many of his letters explaining to early church congregations what it meant to live out the gospel. Ironically, roughly 2000 years later, we are still struggling with the same thing.

Together, our Street Church community committed to a season of reflecting on what it means to come together as one body and lean into the principles of Gather-Sow-Grow. The first week, we talked about what it means to enter into the “House of the Lord” with expectation and anticipation of what is to come. We focused on the fact that we must put ourselves aside in order to encounter the living Christ in our midst. We come with intention and center our hearts on what God has for us in that space, as a people intended for community with one another.

Last week, we had the opportunity to focus on what it means to “Gather” as a community. We rooted ourselves in the book of Hebrews lectionary text for last week (Hebrews 10:11-25). Together we emphasized the reasons why we gather. We gather to Repent, Remember, Rejoice and Proclaim the good news. As a community, we recognize that we are all fragments, broken pieces put back together with the help of God’s grace active in our lives. We gather to remember and remind one another that we are all in need of God’s grace and God keeps the promises set for us. Finally, we gather to rejoice in this good news and to proclaim it to others in the form of love and good deeds for our neighbors.

As an activity, each member of our community took a piece of broken sea glass. One of our members, ‘Dre, drafted, designed, and molded a cross out of clay during worship time. After the sermon, we put each of our broken pieces into the mold of our cross, which represented the love and Grace of Jesus, which holds all of our broken pieces together. Now, this collective piece of art will be a part of our altar at worship time.

In this season of “gratitude” I am immensely grateful that we have a community who shows up for one another. A community who asks the hard questions of what it means to be the “Church” for a community who has often been left out of the question. They have often been ‘served’ rather than asked how they want to serve those in their community (something, I have found, they have already been doing long before Street Church was ever in the picture). As the larger Church, we have the opportunity to gather-sow-grow alongside our neighbors and to come and see what they have to teach us about what it means to be the unified Body of Christ.

I can’t wait to see where we grow next…

Thanks be to God.

Grace and Peace,

Pastor Chelsea

Chaplain | Micah Street Church
Micah Ecumenical Ministries

While away on a Thanksgiving trip to visit my in-laws one year, the last person I expected to get a call from was a detective tasked with investigating me.

Before leaving town, I had gone to check on one of our neighbors named Cathy McCullough. She had been battling cancer and I wanted to make sure she had what she needed while I was gone for a few days.

After a good 20 minutes of knocking on her door, I got concerned and jimmied the lock with my credit card. Cathy was perfectly fine, but she was quite angry that I had both invaded her space and awoken her from a nap. There wasn’t much talking to her at that point, so I left my number, reminded her I was leaving town and told her to call if she needed anything.

She called, alright. She called the police to report me for breaking and entering!

The good news is that the police were content with my samaritan efforts, and they let me go without much fuss.

Cathy’s struggle with what would become terminal esophageal cancer, however, was only just beginning. Some months later, she would become so ill she had to transition to Micah’s respite house where she could be cared for around the clock by members of the downtown churches and staff.

Her suffering was great. The cancer kept her in constant pain, prevented her from eating on most days and eventually attacked her spinal cord, such that she could no longer hold her head up straight. Yet, Cathy maintained this relentless peace about her, embracing whatever life she had left and finding ways to persevere despite her suffering.

Many of us remember fondly her insistence that she have the opportunity to ride a motorcycle before she died. There was no use trying to convince her that it wasn’t safe or she wasn’t well enough. She needed it to happen. Luckily, one of our long-time volunteers and motorcycle extraordinaire had just the connection–a friend with a bike and a side car who was happy to take her for a ride.

Another thing that Cathy felt strongly about was that we help track down her family. She was one of four siblings, but they lived in different parts of the country and had all lost touch with one another over the last 25 years.

Many in the Micah community are often so estranged from family that they don’t have or think it important to list an emergency contact. When they die, that often means there is no one who can legally claim their body, write an obituary, hold a funeral or bury them. Micah is often the recipient of our neighbors ashes many months later when their cremains have been turned over to the local police department as unclaimed property.

In recent years, we have worked to rectify that pattern with community notice of our neighbors’ passing, funerals and burials in various church cemeteries. That was not always the case in Cathy’s day, and she saw to it to teach us how we could walk them to the grave and go on to remember them quite differently.

After learning that her time was coming to an end, Cathy asked that she be Baptized. The pastors of the downtown churches have often assisted with sacramental blessings for our community.

With Cathy’s help, I put my old reporter skills to work and tracked down both her sister in Minnesota and brother in California. Sister Susie traveled to Virginia and spent time with Cathy in her final days. Howard, the brother, couldn’t come at the time. But they talked regularly on the phone and worked together to find their other brother, Michael, who also happened to be in California not far from where Howard lived.

When Cathy died, we held a memorial for her at the city dock and scattered some of her ashes in a place that was important to her street family, which she affectionately called the "river rats." Cathy spent many years living in the woods near the Rappahannock with this legendary group of unhoused neighbors. They had been a nucleus for others who found themselves on the street, teaching people to survive and caring about them as family. Before there was a collaboration of churches, before there was a Micah, our neighbors were a community to each other. Much of what we now know about loving and coming alongside them, we learned from how that group of "river rats" cared for one another and invited us to be a part of it.

While many in the wider community may have never known Cathy and others who have passed on before and after her, their stories still hold power in the lives of our neighbors. They are the saints, whose time in the darkest corners of our community have informed who the church of Fredericksburg has learned it needed to be.

Cathy and so many others were on my mind this past Sunday as our Street Church community lit 26 candles in honor of the current and formerly homeless who have passed on from this world in the last year. In many a congregation, on All Saints Day, we remember the church mothers and fathers, the saints, who have gone before us. We do so to acknowledge that we stand on the shoulders of those who lived and died, yet contributed to our own greater and evolving place of existence.

Our neighbors have and continue to make those contributions in lives of each other. And their experiences inspire us to imagine and pursue a world that looks a lot more like God’s kingdom.

It was Cathy’s group of "river rats" that often found their way to the Micah churches when no other programs were available to them. They befriended church secretaries and pastors downtown. Learning about their struggles led the churches to feeding ministries, clothing closets and eventually a one-stop hospitality center where more members of the congregation could learn these neighbors names, hear their stories and journey with them as they worked their way to the fullness God imagined for them.

It was the terminal health of a man named Mike Cooper, Cathy’s significant other, that inspired Micah churches to have a respite house. When he was dying, the hospital sought the help of the churches to give him a place to stay. He had no insurance and his own family was homeless, as well. The churches rented an apartment and Cathy stayed with him to care for him until he passed. Some years later, the imprint of that experience piggybacked on many more that would come after. It led to a lasting partnership between the hospital and the Micah churches, now an eight-bed group home for homeless leaving the hospital in need of a place to stay or die with dignity.

The lonely deaths of Tammy Speck and Bond Thompson and David Mould and so many other cornerstones in the Micah community led us to understand how much relationships needed to follow our neighbors into housing and be reimagined beyond surviving together. Where tangible supports like housing, income, health care fell short, Street Church was given life.

Revelation 21:1-6 promises a new heaven and a new earth as the ultimate completion of the creation story. Yet, the end always takes us back to the beginning. Old things pass away, God makes a home among us and creation begins again and again and again. God is both the Alpha and the Omega. God shapes and reshapes all things, giving new life and breath to the spaces in which all hope seems lost.

It is the stories of so many saints in our Micah community that have informed who we have learned God needs us to be. The end of their stories is always just the beginning of a new legend on which the people transformed by relationships with them can build a new future.

After scattering some of her ashes, Cathy had asked that a member of our Micah churches, to whom she was particularly close, hang onto what was left. "You’ll know what to do with them someday," she had said. That was at least nine years ago.

A few weeks ago, Cathy’s brother Howard who lives in California called to say he would be coming through town. He wondered if we still had her ashes, as he wished to pick them up and arrange to bury them on a family plot in New Jersey. Their brother Michael had since died and the whole family would be gathering to scatter his ashes, as well.

Howard, his wife, Cathy’s friend and I sat at the big table in our conference room to pass off the ashes. "You know, she practically raised me," Howard said. "I was the baby and as soon as I could leave home I did. I lived with her for a while, but when I left there I lost track of what happened to her."

We laughed together about Cathy’s love of boiled peanuts and peach tea. We marveled at her street smarts, the things she did for survival and the nerve she had to try and get me arrested!

Then Howard said, "For all her ups and downs, Cathy brought the family back together. None of us would have found each other had it not been for Cathy."

As Howard, a spitting image of Cathy, got up to leave, I walked him to the door. If I didn’t know better, I could almost see the spirit of Cathy quietly looking back at me, pausing as she rounded the corner with glint in her eye and a final peace sign.

The Alpha and the Omega, indeed. The works of God being made complete and new, again and again and again.

With Justice, Kindness and Humility,

Meghann Cotter
Executive Servant-Leader
Micah Ecumenical Ministries

Remembering the Saints of 2021

Join the Micah community in lifting up and praying for the saints passed on in 2021.

Christian Maddy, 0

John Fulcher, 38

Muriel Pogue, 47

Stephen Hilleary, 41

Ross MacKenzie, 68

Matthew Allen, 42

David Shupp, 49

Shiferaw Tessima, 57

Wanda Lawson, 61

Wilburn “Wade” Wilkins, 50

Mark Johnson, 58

Tony Melo, 57

Mark Bunting, 40

Gena Wood

Nate Ratliff, 46

Brenda Hinz, 60

Albert Nave,

Kenneth Campbell, 60

Frank Dungan, 40

Dustin Hayes, 32

Antonio "Tony" Hall, 59

David Mould, 63

Mike Defrietas, 59

Ronald Buddington, 58

Shaun Foshee

Frank Smith, 65

It was 10:05 am and our congregation was still trickling in for worship.

We’ve been talking for a few weeks about whether it would be better to start the service at 10:30am, but on Micah time that probably means people wouldn’t arrive until 11am.

Just then, Wendy’s name popped up on my caller ID. I answered.

"So, the bus came and I said to give me two minutes, but I took three," she said. "Is there a way I can get to Street Church?"

"I’ll come get you," I said.

Wendy and I arrived back at Street Church just in time to hear the crux of the sermon–neither Job nor his friends knew enough about creation to determine whether the suffering he experienced has anything to do with judgement. In Job 38:1-7, God pretty much says "you had to be there," when the world was created to understand just how non-mechanical the universe actually works.

As I sat down at my seat, Bobby hollered my way. "Meghann, I need to talk to you." Trying not to be disruptive, I waited a few moments then made my way to where he was sitting.

"Did they tell you I got cancer," he said. "Gonna have to do treatments, but the doctor said I could be alright."

I did know, and he has a long road ahead.

"Would you tell everyone to pray for me," he said. I nodded.

I was about to sit back down, but Buddy walked in. Recently, Buddy had gotten himself in a bit of trouble and needed some help getting a place to stay for a few days. I had arranged to meet up with him on Saturday, but couldn’t find him at the place and time we had arranged.

While I coordinated a hotel room over text, we had a good chat about what got him in trouble and how we could work together and do better this time.

"I’m not going to mess it up this time," he said. "I’m gonna die out here if I do. I am not gonna mess it up. I can’t."

As the service was wrapping up, I continued a text conversation with a young man who had a kidney transplant a few years ago. While the kidney has given him a second chance at life, he has struggled tremendously with depression. I had finally convinced him to let me take him to do his laundry Sunday afternoon, and he was trying to cancel.

"I’m not feeling well, today. Can we do this another day?" he had started at 6:30 that morning.

"You probably aren’t feeling well because you’ve been stuck in bed for days," I advised. Why don’t you take a shower and see how you feel?"

"Be right back," he said.

After a few minutes, another message came through, "Alright, when are you going to be here."

"20 minutes" I said.

In the meantime, I took a call from a woman that counts on Micah to manage her money. She had recently been in the hospital for week and lost her phone in the process. Wendy had asked to stop at the store on the way home, so I told her I would pick up another one.

It took a little longer than I planned. While I rushed off to get the phone, Wendy had filled the cart with more sauces and spices than I have in my own cabinet. "Do you need some food to go with your spices?" I asked when I caught back up with her. After some crafty food stamp math we figured out how she could afford a few heat up meals, a pound of shrimp and some hamburger.

By then, my phone was blowing up again.

"Traffic bad?" said our neighbor who was waiting to do his laundry. It had now been 45 minutes. I picked him up on my way to drop Wendy at home, and decided to make the phone drop off on the way back to Micah to tackle the laundry.

"I’ll be in and out in five minutes," I told my laundry-toting friend in the car.

"Timing you," he said.

Of course, the drop off took more than five minutes.

Recently back in stable housing, the woman who needed the phone had taken up a new hobby of crafting from recycled things. She couldn’t wait to show me the little blue truck she had made from scrap wood, broken necklace pieces and scraps of t-shirt.

"I’m going to write loads of love on the side," she said, quite proud of her creation.

"You are pretty good at this," I said. "We need to find some ways to share your creations with others."

"Well," she paused. "I know a lot about making treasures out of discarded things."

Our eyes caught each other, as we both knew what she was saying implied as much about what she was making, as the triumph and tribulation of her own story.

"I made you something," she said, scurrying off into the living room. She came back with a cross constructed out of ribbon and recycled wood.

"I can’t wait to share this at Street Church," I told her.

I know this might be hard to believe, but I did listen to the sermon Sunday. I did sing the songs; and I was fully present at Street Church. What strikes me about the day, however, are the many ways I saw God working on the periphery, using our community of faith to reorder what we think we know about suffering.

I could say so many things about the suffering of our neighbors. Their stories are deep and painful, usually involving the catastrophic loss of biological family. They’ve lived outdoors. They’ve been hurt and sometimes hurt others. They’ve given up, at times, and been given up on.

From the outside, they and others who gather with us on Sunday are some of our community’s most renowned lost causes. They outwardly suffer. It shows up in their organizational skills their motivation, their gait and usually the tattoo patchwork across their bodies. Yet, inside this community and relationships with these neighbors, the efforts they go through just to make it through another day are inspiring.

I guess you really have to be there, engaged as meaning parts of their lives, to fully appreciate how much our neighbors want to experience the fullness of their creation. You have to be there to appreciate what it took for Wendy to hustle for a ride to Street Church, for Buddy to come looking for help staying out of trouble, for Bobby to admit he’s scared, for a depressed young man to get out of bed, take a shower AND do his laundry in one day, and a woman who is always in crisis to have made something that could be a blessing to others.

People judge our neighbors for their suffering, each and every day. That judgement debilitates and confines them further. But it is days like this past Sunday that I am reminded of the tenacity they have to overcome that suffering when rooted in a place and with a people to whom they can say they belong.

Thanks be to God,

Meghann

Executive Servant-Leader

Micah Ecumenical Ministries