This email went out to our list of supporters and interested folks on January 22nd of 2010. We send something like this out most months – if you would like to get on that email list, please go here and give us your email address. Of course, we won’t share your info with anyone, and we won’t fill your inbox with crazy spam. (Or even sane spam.)
Dear Friends,
Sure, the Easter bunny has gone away and the crème filled eggs are half-off in stores now, but on the Christian calendar, it’s still Easter – a time of celebrating Resurrection.
Maintaining our ministry of love and presence means having to search hard for Resurrection. You find out your alcoholic friend is now experimenting with heroin. Or you watch someone slide further and further from their community and into despair, or you cry with someone who just lost their food stamps and now they have no idea how they will get the still needed groceries. Sometimes, for those for those society has marginalized, it’s just one long Friday. Sunday, and it’s promise of Resurrection seem unlikely at best, and a taunting myth at worst. Somedays, it gets so bad that to hope in Resurrection at all, you have to hunt for it.
You will you see hints of Resurrection long before you find the thing itself – but only if you are looking for them. The long estranged family that finally takes Fred’s calls, and then send him a ticket to come home. Danny getting out of jail and telling us about his new-found sobriety. The guy who gets the pair of boots you guys paid for, who cries because the increase in income means he can move out of his car and into a rooming house. Hints are out there – but you just have to search for them.
Or take our friends Karen and Steve who, you may remember, were living outside in a tent until Troy and Marti invited them to live with them for a season. Over the last few months there have been hints of what the future could look like – Steve’s new job, the vocational training program that accepted Karen, Steve entering the GED program, the new glasses for Karen so she can see, the opening of a first bank account.
New life, however, is always accompanied with birth pangs. Because nothing they have experienced thus far in life has prepared them for this new life, with bank accounts and leases and a community that cares about them, it hasn’t been smooth sailing – not at all. And more than once, Troy and Marti have wondered if they bit off more than they could chew. And several times they were sure they had.
But this weekend Karen and Steve move into their own apartment – in what Karen says is the nicest place she has ever lived. They’re moving on Saturday, but for them, it’s Easter Sunday, with Resurrection and new life breaking out all over.
They have moved into new places before, and there have been new jobs before. Things aren’t magically better – there will be stumbles and failures and slips and falls, just like before. But this time they will not be alone. This time there will be grace. This time there will be love. And if Easter tells us anything, it is that Love Wins.
Thank you for all the love and financial support you have given to Karen and Steve thus far. Their struggle is far from over – in some ways it is just beginning. Please continue to pray for them and us. And of course, the only way we are able to walk beside people like Karen and Steve is because of your continued financial support.
