The Showers Saga - 12: more media coverage (original date: Feb. 22/08)

This entry is hereby turned over to my old mate, Al Siebring, who writes a column for NoApologies.ca, reads the newscasts on the NoApologies radio show, and penned (or processed, since I don't think anyone can read his handwriting) this one for the Cowichan Valley Citizen.

I have a .pdf of the article, but by the time it gets posted here, it would be illegible, so here's the text:

A Duncan church group is making a difference in one of Canada’s poorest neighbourhoods. The Oasis Church – the folks who meet out at the Cowichan River Bible Camp every Sunday – have been helping a mission in Vancouver “clean up” the neighbourhood. Quite literally. The story is an example of how networking works. Or maybe it’s about how God uses what some people would call “serendipity.” One of the key figures in this story is an old friend of mine, Drew Snider. Drew and I go back almost 25 years; we worked together at the old CKDA Radio in Victoria back in the 80’s, and then went to work for competing radio stations in Regina, Saskatchewan for a time. Our careers and personal lives have kept crossing paths.

When I moved back to the Valley almost 10 years ago, we reconnected. I found a changed man; someone who had “found God”, was very passionate about his faith, and was attending Pastor Gerry Wall’s Oasis Church. Today, Drew lives on the mainland. His day-job is as a spokesman for TransLink, but his passion is his work as an “evangelist”; he works with the street people on the downtown east side. Specifically, he’s with an organization called the Carrall Street Church – it’s also called the Gospel Mission (as opposed to the better-known “Union Mission”.) The church has been around since the 1920’s, and has operated out of the second floor of a two-storey walk-up on Carrall Street – next to Pigeon Park – since the end of WWII.

In the almost four years since Drew started volunteering there, he noticed that the street people who would show up for dinner were filthy. Not only that, but they were keenly aware of their filthiness. Often, he says, they would head to the laundry tubs in the back of the building, wash themselves with hand soap, and try to dry off with paper towels. That set him to thinking about meeting not just the spiritual, but also some more of the physical needs of that clientele. And then – late last year – one of the tenants on the ground floor of the building moved out. In an amazing confluence of events – I’m sure Drew would tell you this was “the hand of the Lord” – the vacancy happened at around the same time that he had planned to go to New York City to see an old friend.

While he was in the Big Apple, he stopped in to visit “the Bowery Mission”, the third-oldest downtown street mission in the USA. What he saw there inspired him – when he got back to Vancouver – to approach the landlord on Carrall Street about renting the soon-to-be-vacant space on the ground floor. He wanted the spot for a project that has since been labelled “the Lord’s Rain”. The Bowery Mission, you see, has a “showers” program for street people. A place where these folks can come in off the street and get cleaned up – if not in the sense of getting away from the drugs, at least “cleaned up” in a physical sense.

But there was the small matter of finding the money to rent the extra space. And finding the plumbing supplies. And tracking down the expertise to plumb a bunch of showers into the ground floor of a 70-year old building. Once again, enter the power of networking. Or was it “the hand of the Lord”?

About 15 years ago, when he was working at CFAX Radio, Drew emceed the 100th anniversary dinner for Andrew Sheret, the Island-based plumbing company. So he called them. CEO Brian Findlay remembered him, and when Drew explained “the Lord’s Rain” to him, he instantly agreed to donate all the plumbing supplies to the project, along with some of the expertise to get the installation done. And in a final bit of serendipity that’s just too coincidental to be “just coincidence”, Pastor Gerry Wall’s Oasis Church had decided at around the same time late last year – before Drew had even gone to New York – to make a major donation to the Carrall Street Church.

The money? Well, let’s just say the “extra rent” for the space to be occupied by the showers is looked after, at least for the short term. And Pastor Wall and a number of volunteers from the Oasis have been over to Vancouver a number of times on recent weekends, helping to get the shower stalls built.

This is truly an amazing project. And the way the various threads have come together brings to mind an old quote from Benjamin Franklin: “The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of man.”

The “hand of the Lord”, indeed.