Dear Inner Circle,
“Do you even know what’s going on around here Rev?” Walking through the park and into Orwell Lane, I had been joined by a soft-spoken woman. She is someone who doesn’t initiate conversation, so immediately her question was a hint that we were entering sacred ground together. Our friendship has grown at a snail’s pace, building trust through a year of ‘Good mornings’ before we even got to a single ‘How are you?’.
As a follow up to her question, she took me by the arm and pointed to our noticeboard with all the weekly activities. “You should try some of these, they are really good, and by the look of you, you need it!” I don’t know if she was referring to the gym sessions or the free haircuts or mindfulness groups, but she was as usual right in her diagnosis. Our little conversations mean as much to her as they do to me.
There are some who tell you all there is to know about themselves within a few minutes, or at least, all they want you to know about them. I suspect what appears to be daring self-revelation often is a mirage thrown up as a survival mechanism. Intimacy takes time and trust to emerge, and I marvel at the ways our people here move both frenetically and slowly, always seeking to solve problems in order to meet people, and never the other way around.
“The earth is slow Rev, but the White Ox is patient!” a wizened old fella told me as he rolled, laughed and licked into life his favourite brand of cigarette. Nowhere is this statement truer than out the front of our centres.
If you can be here, you will know that life contains within it a series of moments that stand above time. We often ascribe to time only a quantity—the number of seconds, minutes, hours, days—but it has contours that evoke a sense of quality as well. One could consider themselves fortunate if their lives consisted of more than a handful of such moments.
At Wayside we are too often frantically running around attending to a million requests all at once. But there are moments that transcend the limits of time. Like this past year when we got to pass around, like a puppy at primary school, a baby who was rescued just in time to be placed in the loving arms of one who we used to care for a few decades earlier. To the untrained eye she is a fearsome woman, one who has spent most of her years behind bars. Yet to us, she is a broken-hearted mum, who wept in that moment in the arms of a volunteer who has cared for her for years.
She exists in a kind of ephemeral state, almost an angel, a reminder that at Wayside we locate ourselves at the intersection between life and death, creating a community that dares live at this edge. A place where time can move both slow and fast, and sometimes stop altogether.
Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle,
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel
