Surviving The Fire 4

The farmhouse in Richmond seemed like a godsend.  I was exhausted and burnt-out from street and bar ministry downtown while living there and I was only too glad to have this rustic place of refuge and quiet.  I had very strange and rather hostile neighbours and there was a lot of backbreaking work involved in restoring the house to a liveable state but it was totally worth it.  When I first got the place there were two bedrooms but I repurposed two other rooms to make them both sleepable.  Living alone I would take turns sleeping in different rooms.  I felt like a millionaire.

In the meantime my mother was struggling with life-threatening cancer and my work with vulnerable adults in the Downtown Eastside was becoming ever more difficult and challenging.  I was, in a word, traumatized.  I allowed an ex-cocaine addict and dealer to move in with me in order to facilitate his new discovery of Christ.  He turned out to be more demon than angel and was violent, controlling and manipulative.  Insisting that we were already doing the Lord's work he refused to seek employment or even get welfare.  I in the meantime had lost my job. While people we were trying to support and care for were dying almost every week from AIDS and other causes we struggled with the most severe and grinding poverty.  We were eating weeds and herbs from the back yard and subsisting on scant donations from well-intentioned Christians.  To continue our work of ministry downtown we would sometimes walk the nine miles there, then back again.  Two older women joined us and we became something of a force to be reckoned with.  One of the women's, along with my roommate's, self-destructive urges were taking force and things really went to hell.  My mother died, others were dying, we were often constantly fighting.

I went to London where things got very bizarre at times (I was extorted for around eight thousand dollars) and one of the women back home took in a mentally ill drug addict whom she took into her bed and who beat the crap out of her.  In Amsterdam I was robbed at knifepoint and later I was being stalked by two men who might have been accomplices to the man who robbed me.  I returned to Vancouver to try to bring some order into the chaos that things had spiralled into.  The young mentally ill addict was disposed of and the two women and I lived together in the farmhouse where we all fought bitterly.  More people we were caring for died, and kept on dying.

I became an artist, legally changed my name and the community broke up and I was living on my own all of a sudden for the first time in almost eight years.