Spiritual Autobiography 13

I first became aware of the house on Ferndale during the spring, April 1976 while staying with my mother before moving out on my own again. I was in Richmond taking one of my many long walks. there was a semi-rural road, called Ferndale, and a small old house on a property covered with big trees. I felt moved to stop and pray on that spot and there I had a sense of God filling me with his presence and had a vision of a crystal prism emitting light and colours and I knew he was speaking to me about something that would be revealed in the future. Twelve years later, I was living in that house. It was rather isolated and the neighbours were unfriendly and hostile, plus there were a lot of loose and aggressive dogs marauding the neighbourhood. But it was still a refuge, a needed refuge following everything I'd been through the last several years of ministry downtown. I was still working for St. James and still involved in street ministry, though I had cut things back somewhat. I soon began attending the local Anglican church, St. Alban`s. I kept feeling that there was too much house for one person to live in. There were three, potentially four bedrooms. It was rather a small, cramped kind of place, very rustic, relying on regular oil shipments to keep the heat on since there was no central heating. Not exactly a green house. At that time, my mother was dealing with a lung cancer diagnosis and getting a lot of support from me. I was often exhausted. In the summer, Flippy moved in with me, an ex cocaine user and dealer who had turned his life around following a dramatic Christian conversion. He was quite insistent about joining me in this house and in my work of ministry. We began a discipline of daily prayer, mornings afternoons and evenings and soon were going downtown together. we were particularly involved with gay men living with AIDS and often had people coming over to visit, sometimes to stay overnight. He was not an easy person to live with, being by turns, controlling, demanding and petulant and there was a lot of conflict. I have come to suspect undiagnosed mental health concerns. People at St. Alban`s became interested and some were frequent visitors. Two older women there eventually joined us and we became the Community of the Transfiguration. They lived in and operated a hospitality and refuge house, called Shiloh House, in the Mt. Pleasant area of Vancouver. Flippy and I were extremely, dangerously poor for a good period of time. I had to leave my job because the community and his mood swings had become too demanding and he refused to do anything about income, claiming that the Lord would provide. God provided, all right, but we were often behind in our rent and almost got kicked out, and for a few months we couldn`t even afford bus fare or laundry and had to walk everywhere and wash our clothes by hand in the kitchen. But God did keep us fed and the house going somehow, often through eleventh hour interventions from various kind-hearted folk. I was soon focussing primarily on ministering to downtown street punks and male and female survival sex workers. My mother`s conditioned worsened and I was soon with her every day. She died January 9, 1991, as had already a lot of our friends with AIDS. Flippy, always a wild card, left our community a month later. With some of the money I inherited from my mother, I took off to Europe for a couple of months, hoping to leave behind once and for all this dysfunctional community I had started. the spiritual warfare was also particularly intense, and certain people involved in Satanism actually tried to befriend me. They seemed very intensely attracted to me, but they were also laying all kinds of curses against us. To this day, I suspect that Flippy was one of them, for which reason there was so much conflict and controversy. But we did make a positive dent in people`s lives, if to great personal cost.