Dear Inner Circle,
Lisa and I spent the first 20 years of our married life running what is often described as an ‘open home’, a place where anyone could gather and find a temporary reprieve from the storms they were facing, a cuppa, a feed and a good yarn. There was no such thing as a normal day.
Once, we hid a woman and her seven kids while her partner roamed the neighbourhood in a desperate search for them. He ended up looking in our backyard, and as I was hurrying him off, he sank to his knees, broke down in tears and asked me to pray for him, right there next to the window of the room where they were hiding. I suggested he face away from the house, and I delivered the loudest most impromptu prayer of my life before firmly ushering him away while suggesting he needed to “walk into his future and never look back!”
Another time, a kid ran into our home with someone chasing him because he’d stolen a wallet. He barricaded himself in our toilet. When I talked him out and asked whose wallet it was, he said, “What’s his name? I’ve got a few on me.”
It was an unpredictable time, but what we came to see clearly were the heroines of our community: the mothers whose every waking moment went into making their kids’ lives better and the obstacles standing in their way.
This week is Anti-Poverty Week. One in seven Australians lives below the poverty line, and one in six children. That line sits at half the median household income after tax, which is $584 a week for a single adult. Those mothers lived on the wrong side of that line. Many of the people who walk through Wayside’s doors live there today.
Poverty has a way of making the past feel like a life sentence, but people who are met and valued, tend to become future-focused rather than past-focused. They begin to think about what is possible rather than what is impossible. Their present moment becomes an artefact of the future, and the future is more formative than the past, no matter how horrible that past has been.
At Wayside we see this proven over and over. We meet people whose stories could never be printed, yet what matters is not where we’ve come from but where they’re going. To be drawn by the future rather than driven by the past is the only healthy way to go.
Can an old bloke be drawn by the future? Sure. I’m still investing my life and all I have into others, believing my legacy will live on for and in many.
Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle,
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel