City Of God 36

There is nothing like having a place to live. This is one of the top ten on my thanksgiving, or gratitude, list. I remember a time when housing wasn't that difficult to access in Vancouver. There were tonnes of small cheap units and rooms in old houses throughout the city, and anyone could live with relative dignity, even if you were only on basic welfare. Now, if you are able to live anywhere in this city, whether you own or rent, you are considered privileged, because this has become one of the most costly places on the continent for housing. I came across this place through a whole process of events and coincidences, but it was really God bringing it all together. When I lived on top of that house in East Van in 2000-2002, I had a kind of a vision that I would be living in a condo or apartment downtown, near the Granville Bridge. I laughed about that one. Here I was subsisting on basic assistance, no job, no apparent future prospects while trying to hold it together, and here was God telling me I would be living in a condo downtown. I could hardly contain the laughter. Well, here I am. This isn't really a condominium because it is in government subsidized housing. But my friend whom I've known since our early twenties lives in a similar, slightly bigger, place in a bona fide condo tower just five minutes walking distance from me and he of course bought and paid for his. I wasn't able to, but God has given me a condo. Okay, it's a subsidized apartment, but it's the same kind of dwelling. I know it's the place he led me to because, as I saw in the vision, it was a new medium rise building, and I kept seeing the colour aqua, which it turned out was the colour of the corridors of my building for the first eight or nine years or so before they were painted white. So, in 2001 I was running into the housing advocate for the city on buses, we struck up a rapport, then she got me on a bunch of wait lists and in 2002 I was moving into this place where I still live sixteen year later. It isn't a palace, but a small basic bachelor unit of some 286 square feet. I just did the measurements. I thought it was bigger, around 350, since that's what they told me before I moved in here. Still, it doesn't seem small, and it really is, for me anyway, a comfortable size for one person. I suppose that I could lie and tell people who ask that I live in a condo in downtown Vancouver, and I'm able to afford it because I work in the mental health field, but truth be told, the taxpayer foots most of my rent and I am left having to pay a paltry thirty percent or less of my monthly income for the privilege of living here. Now that I'm a senior, or borderline senior, since I'm still only sixty-two, and collecting Canada Pension, they have reduced my rent by even more. This isn't the best neighbourhood, as I have vociferously complained elsewhere on these pages, but it works. I am housed, I have stability, and if I don't do anything to sabotage myself, I should be okay here for many years to come. Housing is such an important, such a foundational feature to our wellbeing. To this day, I don't know why Canada doesn't include the right to housing as a fundamental element to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I am still poor, in the sense of being on a low income, but I do alright here. I would say that I even flourish here. I only regret that my place isn't big enough to accommodate guests and visitors, but this might also be a blessing in disguise. I get very tired from my work with some of our mental health clients, and I need to rest and restore myself, even if that means having to sacrifice time spent with friends. I have only really been doing good and proper self-care in the last few years. I've always eaten well, but would compromise on needs for rest and detachment from other people's problems in order to feel useful to God. Self care, I have learned, is an essential component to Christian service. I do live with survival guilt, of course, with the homeless people begging and sleeping on the sidewalk outside my building. In the City of God, no one is homeless, and we are all included. We really have an awfully long way to go.