Community And Friendship, 11

The two women joining us was a change, a very necessary change of our PH.  They were incredibly generous and eager to learn the ministry we were ourselves still learning and they invested a lot of money and time into us and our work.  They soon found a house in East Vancouver where they moved and opened a ministry of hospitality, In the meantime we were spending a lot of time in the bars and cafes and on the streets downtown where we continued to meet and befriend local people, many who became regular partakers of our hospitality and not a few of whom abused the privilege.

We tried to meet together for prayer daily and to make decisions through prayer and consensus.  Interestingly, the only thing we never fought about was money,  We all agreed that it was all to be used for the community and to minister to the needs of others and we gave one another a lot of trust.  We were incredibly, almost scandalously generous and we were this way out of our strong desire to honour Christ and his teaching in the Gospel.  Even though we felt drawn into the same work together none of us ever really became friends in the real sense, except that the two women were already friends before and one of the women and I became for a while friends after the community ended.  The other two were lacking in maturity, emotional stability and judgement and brought a lot of harm to us and the work we were involved in together, especially one of the women who became emotionally and sexually involved with a young man with addictions and mental health issues.  She could have been his mother and I basically was begged by the other woman to return from Europe where I had been for two months following my mother's death to help straighten out the mess.

The fellow who originally moved in with me had already left, knowing that I was no longer going to tolerate his abuse.  The irresponsible woman, who entertained fantasies of sleeping with him in order to "cure" him of his homosexual orientation, almost left with him.

In the meantime we were all surrounded by and immersed in death as our friends with AIDS, friends with addictions, friends with mental health challenges, friends just sick of the pain of living, all began to drop around us like proverbial flies.  My mother died.  On top of everything else we could not find any church willing to support or mentor us.  We were a little too radical, and I think, unstable for their comfort.

The two women and I ended up living together for two years in the farm house, as the young lover of the unstable one wrecked their ministry and hospitality house.  It was a very tense and extremely difficult cohabitation but we did our best and continued in prayer and ministry, no matter how bitterly we had come to hate each other.