Dear Inner Circle,
This week the whole country is being asked a strange kind of question: who are you, and where do you live?
For most of us that’s easy enough — a form, a few tick boxes, done before the ads finish on the telly. Thankfully Lisa filled out the forms on our behalf with ease, which is a relief because while I value having a relationship with compliance, we often manage to miss each other, much like Big Bird and Snuffy from Sesame Street.
For a lot of our people, nothing comes easy. This week, census field officers have been turning up across places like Wayside and sitting with people over cups of tea, sometimes over several visits, as they know that a single knock on a door that doesn’t exist, was never going to work. It takes time to build connection and trust, which means showing up more than once.
Here’s something people don’t always know about us: for a good number of our community, Wayside is their address. It’s where the Centrelink letters go. It’s where a daughter can send a birthday card and know it’ll find her father. It’s the one fixed point in an otherwise unfixed life, a place to still be reached, and to still reach out. Every morning our front desk vollies scour the mail to deliver to eagerly awaiting faces, though we are having to start to draw the line at packages being delivered from online websites!
There’s an old idea that counting people is a strange business — that a headcount can just as easily flatten someone into a number as it can honour them. In the ancient Hebrew texts, the census in the wilderness is described not merely as counting people, but as naso et rosh – “lifting the head” – of each person. The intention, to acknowledge the importance of individual dignity. Somebody still has to look up. Somebody still has to be seen doing the looking.
There is someone who every time we meet, we make sure we lock eyes and say hello. All week he has been holding a single flower, nearly the same length as him. I asked him what he is doing with it, and he leapt up and ran over to me, only narrowly being missed by a delivery truck hurtling down the road, and he thrust the flower at me. He is sadly lost in a wilderness.
That word “wilderness” is where a whole ancient generation existed between two identities, between slavery and freedom, camped in a kind of no-man’s-land where, for a while, nobody’s old rank meant much. It’s an odd thing to admit, but I reckon a fair bit of what happens at Wayside lives in that same in-between. People arrive mid-transition constantly — between the street and something steadier, between one chapter and whatever comes next — and we’re not always in a hurry to move them through it. Sometimes the most honest thing we can offer is to sit in the wilderness with someone. ‘I’d rather be lost with you, than saved without you’ is one of my regular pastoral epitaphs.
The census will tell the country how many people are doing it tough this week. It’s a necessary number, and I hope it’s a true one. Let’s remember that the number was never really the point. The point is always the lifted head. I’d like to think that somewhere in all this, Snuffy finally got counted because someone kept showing up to look for him. Other places might be better than us at compliance, but I reckon Wayside has got the finding people bit down pat.
Thanks for being a part of our Inner Circle,
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel
