Dear Inner Circle,
Sundays arrive at Wayside in something of a predictable manner — quietly, and then all at once. Last week, two people found their way to us within minutes of each other.
The first was a man who had seemingly answered some kind of call to relocate and then found himself, suddenly, lost. A new dream in a big city soon became a place with no familiar faces and was turning into a nightmare as he lost all he owned and sat in a park. Someone in passing mentioned our name. He says it was good fortune. We might call it something else.
The second arrived after she was uninvited from her daughter’s family lunch (yes, last Sunday, Mother’s Day). So she walked out of her nice apartment all dolled up for a day that wasn’t happening, into the street, not quite sure where she was going. She was crying. She was looking for anything. Somehow stumbled through our doors for our little service.
Both of them, separately, said they thought the same thing: Thank goodness. I don’t know what I would have done if you weren’t here.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot, with sense of wonder. Neither of them were sent here. There was no referral, no intake form waiting, no one who knew they were coming. They simply arrived at the edge of something and found an open door.
Our mission of “creating community with is no ‘us and them’” is not something we manufacture. We can’t orchestrate it. We can only keep the door unlocked and the lights on, and trust that the thing we’re trying to make space for is already looking for us.
Someone said to me recently that the space between hedonism and asceticism is where God is. I’ve been turning that over. It’s a liminal space, by its very nature, found in proximity to pain, uncertainty, the places where we’ve run out of our own resources. You can’t set up camp there. You can only recognise it, and usually only after you’ve passed through. Most cognition, as they say, is recognition. Sunday felt like that. Two people who didn’t know each other, who’d had entirely different weeks, both arrived at the same threshold, and here we were to meet them. It wasn’t planned, it is who we are.
On a completely unrelated note, I have now been told three times this week that I look like I need a holiday. I am actually doing really well, living life in proximity to liminality invites humility. It just photographs a certain way.
Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle,
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel
