Dear Inner Circle,
Lisa and I were recently profiled for a piece in the Good Weekend magazine here in Sydney called “Two of Us”. It’s a long-running series interviewing each half of a duo: sometimes business partners, sometimes family members, sometimes romantic partners, sometimes, in the case of Lisa and I—all of the above.
You might know that I first met Lisa when I had dropped out of uni to join an organisation living and working in the poorest areas of Melbourne. I showed up late and unprepared, as usual, but we got to know each other more and more. Thank God she let her guard down momentarily because sixteen months later, I proposed on the beach at St Kilda with a plastic, yellow, smiley-face ring from a 40-cent machine in Springvale. Love moved her to say yes (though I still hope it wasn’t the kind of love born from pity).
“What would love do?” is a phrase I heard from a mentor years ago. If you think about it, it’s really the only question worth asking in a place like Wayside.
For most of our visitors, the depths of trauma and the twists and turns of life make any retracing of steps a dance of pain and confusion. So we look to love instead, and try to answer the question of what it might do now.
I see the answer when one of our frontline workers warmly embraces a man who has worn the same clothes for a week and kindly hands him a new set of socks and underwear.
I witnessed it recently at the end of an exhausting day, in an embrace between two weary souls—one who works tirelessly in our back offices, and the other, a young woman who has fallen on hard times. “Thank you, Wayside, for being here when our lives fall apart. I just don’t know what we would all do if it wasn’t for you.”
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel
