I have a friend who lives on the street, drinks a lot of cheap alcohol and is estranged from the life he grew up in. When I talk about hope he counters with, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what hope even means”.

Fair enough.

I do believe that when I am talking to my friend who self-describes himself as hopeless, I have to be willing to share the reality of my own life when explaining the hope I know.

I don’t think that I have made it a secret on these pages that I have my own share of difficulties. My parents divorced when I was seven and my brother three. I have spent much of my life battling the desire to be a people pleaser and so-called perfectionist. I’ve had my heart broken. My husband has Multiple Sclerosis, which he was diagnosed with while we were first engaged, nearly 17 years ago. My Dad died suddenly and too soon in 2008. My Mom has lived in hospital for 10 years as of 2014- this the result of removing a brain tumour which would have caused the same damage had it been left alone.

These are some of the bigger ticket items in my life and of course don’t tell the whole story. The trouble with a list like the one above is that it fails to communicate the complications that arose out of each item. True too is that these are not strictly my OWN things, they involve many others. I am not an island.

The truth is, I don’t get why the storms around me have very rarely been calmed. I have shed buckets of tears, both in front of people and hidden away behind closed doors. I have screamed at and wrestled with God until completely exhausted. I have argued that it is entirely false that “God won’t give you more than you can handle”. I have thought that hope was in fact, all lost.

Somewhere in the midst of each struggle I have been given strength. I am this weak girl who has strength not my own. I am ever so slowly watching my heart being healed. I am learning to be present to the moment, where I catch glimpses of light and hope as simple as being handed a cup of cold water by my friend- the friend who until that moment thought he had nothing left to give.

“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed”. 2 Corinthians 4:7-9

A couple of Sundays ago I was busy setting things up for our afternoon service. A community member (I’ll call him Tom) showed up to help and chat.

Tom is one of my younger folks, someone who many might refer to as more of a “street kid”. He has a mop of dark hair, likes to wear baggy clothes and walks with his head down. Tom’s reality is one where couch surfing, eating at drop-in centres and hustling for money is the norm. He also regularly makes me laugh out-loud.

On this day Tom was telling me about having spoken to a family member for the first time in 3-ish years. He decided to call because it was Christmas. Since connecting he has been contemplating the truth that if this person dies, he will no longer have any blood relatives. He repeatedly said, “Erinn I’m gonna be totally alone”.

I found myself listening to much of Tom’s story while standing by the counter in the small kitchen. I heard about his childhood, his desire to fit in, his struggle with substances. Absent-mindedly I poured some milk into a container and tossed the drained carton into a recycling bin.

Tom stopped mid sentence and said, “Erinn! You aren’t recycling properly. Look, let me show you…”. Tom retrieved the carton, rinsed it out, flattened it and gently placed it back in the bin. He told me that recycling is one of the few things he can do to make sure the world is a little better. I immediately felt his chastisement and learned my lesson. Though I think he thought it weird, I was moved by the experience. There was something beautiful about the care he took with the one thing he has control of.

My heart is large for Tom. In some ways he feels like my kid, and if I’m not mistaken he feels like it too. His real life stories often make me wince and wish it could all be different. I tell him frequently that he is not alone and I hope against hope that he believes it.

I also tell him that I every time I recycle I now think of him.

Our Monday Drop-In is always a riot of activity with people chopping food, making coffee, setting tables, finding the stray olive oil, making more coffee, sanitizing the sink, getting trays into the oven, handing out tokens, cleaning up spills, dealing with crisis inside the kitchen and out, doing A LOT of dishes, etc., etc. This past Monday we decided to make things even more of a riot by planning a special, festive meal that required the use of an additional kitchen off-site. At this time of year there is a lot of turkey on the go in the neighbourhood. As a result, we have traditionally held off our turkey dinner until the dark days of February. Still wanting to feast, we were so pleased when Second Harvest gave us a number of beautiful hams. The problem? Our ovens are rather small. Fortunately our friends at the West End Food Co-op agreed to make their big convection oven available to us.

So, first thing on Monday morning the hams were loaded into my car (The Dale’s current storage space!) and driven just down the street. Things at the Drop-In seemed to progress smoothly: squash, apple and peppers got roasted, salad prepared and potatoes boiled and mashed. The hams? Well, they mysteriously just didn’t seem to be cooking. I kept checking in with the keepers of the hams, Joanna and Ian only to become increasingly worried that our lunch would not be starting at 1 pm as it should.

12:45 pm came and the hams were not to temperature, despite being in the oven for longer than required. Panic started to rise. We decided that at 1 pm I would announce that things were running behind and invite people to sing some carols. After singing every verse of Joy to the World, Silent Night and O Come all Ye Faithful the hams were still not in the building. We made our usual announcements, Souad introduced our kitchen team one by one (greeted with much applause) and finally we decided to serve the salad as an appetizer (a first for us).

Finally the hams arrived, though there was concern we might need to cook them further. More panic. Here’s the amazing thing: we began carving the meat in order to fit it all back in the oven to discover it was in fact done. We cleared the salad plates and replaced them with platters of steamy food and it was…delicious! Sandy, a friend and volunteer passed around the 500 (!) beautiful homemade cookies she brought. There was a lovely air of celebration and gratitude.

Someone joked we had experienced a Christmas ham miracle. Something tells me they weren’t far from the mark.

Each day I find myself experiencing series of moments that serve to remind me of that which is most important. Today was no different.

One man spoke intently to me about the sorrow that follows him around, a sorrow rooted in not sharing in enough relationships where he can be entirely himself; where he isn’t expected to foot the bill (even though he has very little); where he can give and receive. He kept saying, “all I want is to have friendships that are founded on simple things, like where we can just talk, seek to understand one another, wish one another peace and it is…enough. One of the only places I have these kind of friendships is here”.

Another long time friend finally let me and one of my outreach partners into his “pad”- the rather large, one bedroom apartment that he recently got into. It is VERY sparsely furnished, a little worn and dirty, and HIS. This friend is struggling with multiple health issues which range from cancer to substance addiction. He has little, but now is warm at night. When asked what else he needs, his reply was, “a plant, one that can help filter the air and warm up the place”.

I sat beside a man at the drop-in who carries a bottle of sherry in his sleeve at all times. Some days he consumes 9 of them. He told me that all he wants for Christmas is to drink egg nog instead of booze.

Every Monday is the same: I get a hug from a friend who wants nothing else except a hug back; I am handed a coffee, made just the way I like it, from one of my crotchety-est friends because that’s his self-declared role; a friend plays the real piano in the drop-in for 20 minutes and can’t shake his smile.

As I consider that we are already in December and staring down Christmas, I am struck by how I long to relish in these moments, these gifts. On the surface they might seem so simple, but are actually deeply revealing. We fundamentally need to be in relationships and have safe places to be ourselves. To find this is a greater gift than anything that comes in a box. Though I suspect that some of the most precious Christmas gifts I give this year are going to be a single potted plant and a carton of egg nog, sans the spirits.

I plan to put big bows on each.

When I first started blogging I made the decision to at least attempt writing from a vulnerable, transparent place. I began the effort by announcing that I was in therapy. At that time I found myself being called into a new place of leadership in Parkdale and thought it fair to share what a wounded “leader” I really was (and am).

For much of my life I have struggled with internal anxiety. True too, rather ironically, is that I am generally externally calm. Both honestly exist in me. The anxiety reached a point though where I knew I needed to face it in a new way. Deep down I think there was always an awareness this was rooted in a fear of the future: what may or may not happen and how little control I had over any of it. Suddenly, due to a collision of circumstances I realized that my anxiety revealed a lack of trust in God and how I was finding my worth in things other than Him.

As I sit here writing I am struck by how different I feel close to two years later. I worry less about the future. My brain does not constantly churn in a way it should not. I feel more present to the moment than maybe I ever have before. I am slowly stumbling toward learning that my worth does not come from what I do: I am valuable simply because I am a beloved child of God. It has been both a painful and beautiful journey of discovery.

This has all been very good news to my heart. It’s like by squeezing out the anxiety there’s more room for other things, including gratitude. In a sense, I am getting to reclaim my imagination for things other than worry. I am not suggesting everything in me is fixed; I am saying that I am experiencing healing, one baby step at a time.

Two years later, this seems worth announcing.