So, the big news is… this week, we take possession of what will be the new offices of Love Wins Ministries .

It’s the result of a partnership between Hillyer Memorial Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and Love Wins – we have been working on it behind the scenes for a few months now, but we finally got all the details worked out.

The building (that is it in the picture at the top of the page) is located at 707 West Jones Street (map), just a block off the R-Line and on three major bus lines. It is  a bit over 2200 square feet, with a fully built out attic and a basement with a concrete floor.  We will have space for storage, space for offices, a conference room, a small chapel for our worshipping community to meet each week and lots more. And, it will mean a savings of over $8500 in just the first year over all our current arrangements.

This is a big deal for us – it gives us permanence in the community, a place we can make long term plans and opens us up to many more options – most of which we haven’t even figured out yet.

Over the next month, we will establish a schedule of office hours (for which we will need volunteers to work the front desk – so keep your eye out for that). When that is settled, I will post it here.

We will need your help in so many ways – here are some off the top of my head:

• Moving stuff from paid storage to here
• Helping us move offices
• Painting
• Helping us find furniture
• Signage
• Volunteer signups to work our front desk
• Yard work

Thank you so much for all your love and support, and a big thank you to the good people at Hillyer Memorial Church.

Got questions? Put them in the comments.

He and I were to meet at the CVS at 9:00am. By 9:30, I gave up on him, but only after standing in the cold for half an hour. That Jim was not there when we agreed to meet is no reflection on his character, per se. When you are homeless, time is a fluid concept. He got out of the shelter at 7:00 or so this morning and so it is quite possible he sat outside the CVS from 7:30 until 8:50 and then gave up on me. 

Or maybe he found someone to hand him $4 cash yesterday after we talked. Or maybe he forgot. 

In any event, there are countless ways to have made the project called “Get Jim some drugs” more efficent.  Off the top of my head: 

• Have a volunteer take him yesterday to the 24 hour pharmacy and pay for his drugs.
• Have a $5 CVS giftcard in my pocket
• Agree to meet him this morning at the shelter and take him to the pharmacy.
• Develop a prescription drug program.
• etc.

Any of those would have been more efficent and, in fact, more effective at the project called “Get Jim his drugs”. 

But that is not the project I am working on. 

Instead, I am part of a project that could be called “Let’s Get to Know Jim”. And all relationships involve deliberate inefficency.

When you meet a friend for lunch, you do not go to the place that promises you the most efficent souce of high quality calories – instead you go to the place that makes hanging out with your friend the easiest. Things like quality of food, how fast the kitchen is and even cost take a back seat to things that make it easier to spend time with your friend. You are not working on the project called “Get Maximum Calories at the Best Price”. You are woking on a project called “Hang out with Mike over Food”. 

So, the project called “Get to Know Jim” took a hit this morning. It cost me a half an hour in the cold and fleeting frustration. And occasionally, on days like this, I am reminded why the projects other people are working on are the ones they are working on – because the relational way is hard and inefficent. 

That does not mean it is wrong, however. 

I have no idea how I first met Hugh Hollowell and was introduced to Love Wins Ministries but he’s become one of those friends that you swear you’ve known your whole life.  You know, the one who is SO MUCH like you but keeps you honest and real?  Yeah, he’s like that.  Awesome and meddlesome, all at the same time.

Growing up as a preacher’s kid at Central Baptist Church in downtown Miami, FL meant seeing lots of homeless folks…even serving them a hot meal on occasion from the mission at the back corner of the church parking lot.  But it never meant getting to know them.  Or seeing them as real live human beings.

Leave it to Hugh to make me re-think that old script.

I end up subscribing to the Love Wins newsletter and one day read this post about/from Tony.  Specifically, this:

“Please tell the people who give you this money that I am so grateful. That I could not have made it this long without you guys. And that while it may not seem like a big deal to them, it has changed my life. Hell, it probably saved my life.”

Damn it, Hugh.

That night, my family becomes a monthly contributor to Love Wins.  Hugh DM’s me on Twitter to say that we rock.  I tell him to shove it because it’s a pittance and I want it to be more.  I can almost feel him roll his eyes when he responds, “You don’t know what I can do with a pittance.”

In the next few months, I can’t get Tony off my mind.  Eventually, I email Hugh and ask if there’s any way I can get in touch with him.  Become his friend and let him know that someone other than Hugh cares about him and wants to know him personally.

Tony agrees and we start emailing.  Just getting to know each other.  When Tony mentions that he could use some dishes and kitchen supplies, I just smile and shake my head.  God’s sense of humor and timing continues to slay me…I have a ton of stuff I’ve “inherited” when a great-aunt passed away.

I had the opportunity to give these things to Tony in person yesterday.  I got to see where he lives, hug him, introduce him to my daughter, and talk smack about NC football teams.  I discovered that his birthday is close to my anticipated due date and promised I would email him when I found out the sex of the baby at the end of this month.

Hugh told me today that I have no idea what that short visit meant to Tony.  I told him that I know what it meant to me.

Because, you see, Tony is my friend.

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It is only because of people like Christina that we are able to do this work.  If you would like to partner with us to make sure we are able to continue to work with people like Tony, you can click here to find out more. 

Sandie is an addict – in recovery until a few months ago, when she fell back into using. And like any addict, she did whatever it took to feed her addiction. In this case, whatever it took included stealing several computers and musical instruments from a local church and then pawning them.

I spend a lot of time in court these days. And visiting folks in jail.

Recently, somebody asked me why I would go to court for someone who was obviously guilty. The amazing thing for me is that this person was a Christian Minister

Have we forgotten this passage?

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’

“Then these righteous ones will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?’

“And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’

The amazing thing in that passage is that the King puts no qualifiers on who we visit in prison. It does not matter if they are repentant, or not. Or innocent, or not. Or if they appreciate it, or not.

Visiting the prisoner is not only A mark of true devotion to Jesus, but one of THE marks.

You might disagree with me – that minister did.

But I think your argument in that case would be with Jesus, not with me.

Below is our guide for being a Love Wins digital volunteer. The main thing to keep in mind is this: We are limited by how many people know about us. The more you post links to our stuff, like and +1 our stuff, comment on our stuff and forward our emails, the better it is for us.

Thanks so much for your help!

Our Content

The Blog

The official blog for Love Wins Ministries is updated about weekly. Here are the big things you can do:

• Subscribe to our RSS Feed.  If you don’t know what RSS is, you can learn more about it here.
• Or, you can sign up to get an email when we update the blog. We won’t share your info, but we hope you will forward the emails you get from us to friends who will be interested in them.
• Comment on our blog posts.  The more comments we have, the more love we get from Google, so more people see our stuff.
• Link to our blog posts in your blog posts, and write your thoughts. You don’t have to agree with us – just get the link right.
• Share links to our blog posts on social media sites. (See below)

The Newsletter

Sign up for our e-newsletter. We won’t share your info with anyone.

• Every edition of our newsletter has its own URL, which we tweet. So, share it on all the social media sites you participate in.
• Our newsletter comes monthly via email. If you think it would be meaningful to a friend or people in your church, please forward it to them.

Social Media

Facebook

There are three big things you can do for us here:

• “Like” our Facebook page.
• Post links to our blog posts on your Facebook page
• Click Like on our posts on our Facebook Page. The more you like them, the more people see them.
• Comment on our posts on our Facebook page

Twitter

On twitter, we need you to

• Follow us on twitter.
• Retweet our tweets .
• Tweet links to our blog posts and newsletters to your followers.

Other Sites:

There are lots of other sites out there – MySpace, Google+ and so on. But they all work pretty similarly, in that we need you to share links to our content. So, post links to our stuff. Please?

Your Sites

The big thing we need from you is links, links, and more links.

• An easy way to do this, if you are a blogger, is to put a link to our blog (http://lovewins.info/blog) in your blogroll (which is a list of links in your sidebar to sites you like)
• Slightly more work is to write a post on your blog about something we have written, and link to the original post. Or, write a blogpost about our work and link to our homepage.

Join our alerts list

Go here and join our digital volunteer list. This list will be used only when we have an “important” post going online somewhere, and we have a special need for links, tweets, comments, etc. You are probably looking at less than one email a month.

Donate your time

We have no office staff. Go here to sign up to be notified when we need off-site administrative help. Typically, this is stuff like data-entry, transcription, etc.

Donate your money.

Not to be crass, but this stuff ain’t free. We can only do our work with your contributions. Click here to become a financial donor.

Danny is a 39 year old ex-con, with a few piercings and  jail-house tattoos. Shelia is a 42 year old blond with a sweet disposition, but no job skills. Over the last three years, I have watched them date and then break up, watched them float in and out of housing – never very stable housing, but housing none the less – and watched them struggle with the daily stresses that come with trying to stay together despite the pain and stigma that comes with being homeless in the US.

Call me a romantic if you want, but they are ridiculously cute together. He always carries her bag for her. She wears flowers in her hair he picked in the park. He asks her opinion on big (and small) decisions. They are, by any definition, in love with each other.

Back in May, they went to the courthouse and got legally married. For the next week, they showed that marriage license off like it was the holy grail – they were so proud of it.

Shelia comes to me a few weeks later and asked me if I would do her a favor. “All little girls dream about their wedding day”, she said. “I was wondering if you could help us get married in a church, with music and walking down the aisle and everything”.

Which is why this Thursday night, thanks to the hospitality of Hillyer Memorial Church, Danny and Shelia are getting married, with music and walking down the aisle and a preacher (that would be me) and everything. Our good friend (and associate minister at Hillyer) Allison took Shelia shopping last week for a wedding dress – they got one at Goodwill that was over the top with acres of lace and full sleeves. Shelia called it a “princess dress”.

After the ceremony, we are throwing a reception for them here at the Love Wins offices, with a wedding cake, butter mints (a special request), cupcakes, and punch. And, if we can swing it, a few nights at a decent hotel for a honeymoon of sorts.

The swinging it part is where you come in. You can make a strong argument that this is not going to help anyone long-term and thus is not worthy of your support. But if that is your argument, then you have missed the point of what we are doing out here. Things like dignity, respect and love are damned hard to find out here – some days they are completely hidden. So when we find them, I want to encourage them any way I can. And if that means spending a couple of hundred dollars to make sure a couple who has the entire deck stacked against them have a few days where they feel ridiculously loved, I am willing to do that. I hope you are too.

If you are local and want to help us put the reception on or help with the wedding, email me and let me know. And if all you can do is send us a few dollars, I hope you will, because we need some financial help to make this happen.

If you want to help us pay for this, please go to our donate page or click on the donate button below. And if you can’t do anything but pray for them, go ahead and do that – they are going to need it.

# # #

We are only able to continue doing this work because of your donations. Would you click here and partner with us financially?

Tony was introduced to me by a formerly homeless man whom I had helped several years ago. “Tony is a good guy,” my friend said. “He just doesn’t have anybody.”

After meeting Tony, I did not have high hopes. He was living in a half-way house that has a reputation for not being particularly well run, he was six weeks sober and was a convicted felon.

We agreed to start meeting on Thursday mornings at a local coffee shop. On our first meeting, he told me he wanted to die, because he saw no way out. That was four months ago.

Every week, he tells me about the stress that comes from living in a house full of addicts. We talk about the endless search for a job that will ignore his felony record that came from a petty drug charge. I show him coping methods to help manage his stress. We drink good coffee (which you pay for) and he shows me pictures of the ex-wife and kids he drank out of his life.

While I am the one sitting in that coffee shop with Tony, you are the one who makes it possible.

Over the last four months, a few times you have helped him make the $98 weekly rent it costs him to stay in the halfway house. When we met, he had a prepaid cellphone that cost .60 cents a minute to use. He was spending over $100 a month to stay in touch with potential employers. You bought him another phone that offers unlimited minutes for $35 a month.

When he got a part time job unloading produce trucks in an un-air-conditioned warehouse, you bought him a monthly bus pass so he could get to work. Tony is fifty years old and has poor circulation, so when the doctor prescribed a medicine to help with his circulation, you paid the $5 to get the prescription filled. Oh, and it was a prescription he had carried around in his pocket for a week, because he did not want to ask for help yet again.

Last Thursday, Tony asked if I could run him up to the dollar store, so he could buy the one dollar package of detergent to wash his clothes. When we got there, I saw him eying the toiletries, so I convinced him to let you pay two dollars for a pack of razors and a new deodorant stick. He counted out his pennies and nickles for the detergent, however.

When we get back in the car, he is silent. When I press him, he tells me that he is filled with overwhelming gratitude. I try to wave him off.

“No,” he says. “It is a big deal. When I met you, I wanted to die because I was convinced no one cared. Please tell the people who give you this money that I am so grateful. That I could not have made it this long without you guys. And that while it may not seem like a big deal to them, it has changed my life. Hell, it probably saved my life.”

I agree. A big reason Tony has stayed sober these six months and stayed housed and stayed sane has been because of the work you people pay me to do. Yes, you paid for his toiletries and bus pass and helped a couple of times with his rent, but you also paid my salary that lets me spend two hours a week with a felon in a coffee shop.

If you are one of our contributors, Tony and I both thank you. If you have not yet decided to help support our work, I hope you will, because I know lots of Tonys.

“Tasha overdosed “, were the first words out of Ramone’s mouth when I answered the phone.

Ramone is one of our most fervent volunteers, who checks in regularly with one of the homeless camps near his house. He often brings me up to date on the latest. I could have gone all day without hearing this.

Tasha is 19 and frustrating to no end. She has been on her own for the last three years after running away from an abusive home. She quickly discovered street smarts she did not know she had, enabling her to morph from popular 10th grader to crafty street urchin.

It does not hurt her cause a bit that most men think she is beautiful.

Unfortunately, along with not finishing high school, she also picked up a drug habit with no means to pay for it. So, she swaps sex for drugs.

Her drug of choice is heroin, but occasionally, like she did this time, she speedballs, mixing crack and heroin. And like most users, she can look you right in the face and tell you whatever you want to hear.

Like when I went and visited her in the hospital. She hugs me and, with a tear in her eye, tells me she almost died.
“I don’t want this life anymore,” she says.

I want to believe her. But I don’t.

I want to believe her because, with her poor judgment and track record, she is a sure candidate for HIV or Hepatitis C. Or ending up with a bad trick. I really wish she wanted to quit. But she doesn’t.

Honoring people’s choices is hard. Loving people when they choose poorly is even harder.

Four days later, she leaves the hospital against medical advice because she is healed, she tells me on the phone the next day. She thanks me for the shampoo and snacks I brought her in the hospital, and asks me to pray for her.

She refuses to go to NA meetings. She says they are for losers who want to whine rather than take control. Instead, she tells me she has quit on her own. Willpower, she says.

I want to believe her. But I don’t.

# # #

A lot of you have heard about Eric’s murder in Moore Square a few weeks ago. For those who haven’t, the short version is that we were serving biscuits when another man walked up to Eric and stabbed him. Eric died and the police arrested the other guy. I wrote a blog post about it here, and NBC17 interviewed meabout our response.

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Speaking of the blog, if you go here and give us your email,  you get an email whenever we update the blog. (This is a separate list than the one you are on for this email).

Acquiring space is scary for us, regardless how cheap it is for us to get, but the benefits overruled the cost. We now have close to 1000 square feet of open space to conduct trainings, allow volunteers to sort donations and to allow us to add programming.

I am currently moving from my previous office to the new one, so things are a bit chaotic at the moment. Once we get it up and going, maybe we will have an open house so you can come see what we are doing with the space.

There are several things we need to make being there better – if you have anything on the list and want to donate it to us, we will be very appreciative. Just leave a comment below and I will get in touch with you asap.

For you and me, the Fourth of July means cookouts and celebrating the American dream. For most of the people I work with, it means another day of realizing just how far they are from achieving that American Dream.

There will be hot dogs, baked beans, watermelon and lemonade and much more (we hope, anyway). If somebody could bring some guitars and games, that would be pretty cool too.

Last year over 300 people (housed and homeless) ate hotdogs and chips and there was much joy and laughter!  People who lived outside sat next to folks who live indoors and ate together, laughed together and played together.  If you were there, you saw a foretaste of what the Kingdom of God could look like.

We will not be proselytizing, passing out tracts, preaching or doing faith healing. We will be laughing, eating together, playing games and showing what the love of Jesus looks like.

If this sounds like something you would like to be a part of, great! We need lots of food and help to pull this off. If you go here, there is a list of things we need, as well as an email address where you can tell us what you can bring. As stuff is entered, we will edit the list, so that is the best place to go for our current needs.

If you can’t bring anything, just bring yourself – but still let us know how many are coming.  Of course, money is always appreciated to help defer the costs – last year we came out of pocket about $200. If you can’t make it out but you want to send us some funds to help cover things you can send us some money by clicking here.

If you can come, just reply to this post and let us know how many folks total you think you will bring and which, if any, items on the list you can bring.

Thank you for helping us to show some folks who often get left behind a little love, dignity and respect.