Volunteer at The Lord's Rain

The Lord's Rain -- the street-level outreach at Gospel Mission, which provides showers for people on the Downtown East Side -- has a number of opportunities for volunteers. These provide a unique chance to interact with people who have been essentially "written-off" by society and truly need hope and a hand-up, rather than a hand-out.

The volunteer positions are in early mornings -- between 7 and 8:30 am -- on Mondays (women only), Thursdays and Fridays. Duties involve:

• making and serving coffee
• handing out towels, soap, etc.
• finding clothing or shoes when asked
• cleaning up

But most importantly, these volunteer positions involve interacting: listening to people and encouraging them. Just knowing that someone from "the outside" cares about them can give someone hope to carry on, and hope is probably the most precious commodity on the DTES.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please contact Janet Klassen, Assistant Pastor (and responsible for The Lord's Rain) at janet@gospelmission.net. 

Another volunteer position involves driving: we need someone to pick up the end-of-day product donation every Monday at 7pm from Cobs Bread in Caulfeild Village in West Vancouver. It requires a car -- a small hatchback will do -- and the ability to lift and load the bags. Once the product has been picked up, it needs to be delivered to The Lord's Rain -- either that same night or the following morning. 

If you are interested in this volunteer position, please contact me at drewdsnider@gmail.com.

You can find out more about the story of The Lord's Rain in this video presentation.

Junior - and the joy of giving

Frankly, I'm getting sick of writing obits for members of my "family".

In the past year, we've lost Barry Smith and Tina, and many others have come and gone over the years. "Let us learn to show our regard for a man while he is alive and not wait until after he's dead," Meyer Wolfsheim, a character in The Great Gatsby, said, so in that spirit and noting that Junior's time is short, I'd like to spend a few words on him while he's still around to contradict or embellish.

Junior comes across as a rough-hewn Cockney git, and when I first met him, he constantly sported a red ballcap with the flag of England on the back. He loved to talk about his rough past, with dark allusions to underworld connections. 

A few years ago, I let him make an "important" phone call. The call evidently went to voice mail.

"Junior. Later." And he hung up.

That more or less summed up the Junior Mystique: was he calling some gang connection? Setting up a rendez-vous? Calling a non-existent number and making us think he was doing some big business deal that dared not speak its name? 

A few weeks later, someone came into The Lord's Rain when Junior was there. "Don't I know you?" he said. "I don't know you," Junior replied. "Weren't we in Maple Ridge?" the stranger persisted, referring to the provincial jail. "I don't know you," Junior repeated.

Junior turned his attention back to telling whatever joke or anecdote he was telling me, and the stranger kept hanging around.

"I wanna ask you something," the stranger said at length.

"What?"

"Come out here with me."

"Not a good idea," I mumbled towards Junior.

"I ain't goin' nowhere," Junior said to both of us.

"No - come out. I just want to ask you something."

Junior ignored him. The stranger still hung around. I was distracted by something else and when I looked back, both of them were gone. Suddenly, Brad -- a former volunteer -- rushed in. "Drew! Get out here!" We went out and there Junior was, sitting in the alley with his back against the brick wall, bleeding from the side of his head. Junior wasn't into talking at the time, but Brad saw it and said he'd been brought down with a single sucker-punch. I called 9-1-1 for an ambulance. Junior was remarkably cooperative as they helped him in, as if the hospital would be his witness-protection program for the time-being.

When Cheryl Weber came to do a feature on The Lord's Rain in 2009, Junior suddenly stood up and recited the Pater Noster -- the Lord's Prayer in Latin, in its entirety. Cheryl's photographer shot it, although none of the footage was used.

His real name is Eric. One day, I asked him the obvious question. "How did you come to be called 'Junior'?"

The story that followed was one of those ones that was so off-the-wall, it had to be true. It turns out, he was born in India in 1948 to a 70-something member of the British Raj. Dad -- who I believe was Eric Senior -- moved back to England and left the lad in the care of his sisters in India. He eventually found his way to England, some time in a public school (what we refer to as "private" schools in Canada) and running with gangs and criminals and tough guys around Nova Scotia and Quebec on a motorcycle. Names like "Mom" Boucher, the notorious Hell's Angels kingpin, would roll off his tongue like an informant out of the back of a darkened van. Whether his talk was bigger than the reality, slightly embellished or absolutely 100% true, we may never know.

At the end of the day, Junior has been a loner. I've never known him to associate with anybody, and in many ways, a 10-minute visit to The Lord's Rain -- maybe to get coffee, maybe not -- seems to be the closest he comes to social interaction. The tales of underworld connections, while they may make some of us say, "yeah - right ...", may be Junior's way of isolating himself from the world. I still don't know why he got punched in the head.

Almost a year ago, now, Junior showed up at The Lord's Rain. The ballcap had been replaced by a large white cowboy hat. "I got cancer," he told me, matter-of-factly. "The docs say I won't see Christmas." I prayed over him for healing and peace.

The "docs" have missed the mark by several months. He comes in from time to time, by now, wearing an expensive black leather jacket.cowboy boots and a very impressive-looking watch; he also walks slowly, with a cane, and he wears sunglasses. He has grown progressively gaunt and pale in the past few months.

Yet there's still a bit of the swagger to him, and, almost to keep his own spirits up, he invariably has a joke. "Have you ever heard of an African elephant?" "Yes." "This over-sexed African elephant mated with a rhinoceros. You know what you call the offspring?" I shook my head.

"'ell-if-I-know."

(Believe it or not, I just now got it. You have to say it over a few times, I guess.)

And off he went. I figured this might be my last chance for a picture and this might be the most appropriate: a lonely figure, leaving me trying to figure out a joke as enigmatic as the man himself.

===

Maybe there's a bit of the latent bureaucrat in me -- and considering I couldn't organize a sock drawer, that could draw some guffaws from people who know me -- but when a new donation of clothing arrives at The Lord's Rain, I prefer to take some time sorting it and making sure we know what's in it. It could be that I've seen too many occasions where people have descended on a pile of donations like a pack of Tasmanian Devils on fresh carrion.

So when my friend Gloria arrived recently with a sackful of clothes her teenage sons had gathered -- along with a large garbage bag filled with new socks -- I naturally told John that we'd take some time to sort them before we'd give them out.

But then I went upstairs, and John, being the impetuous sort that he is, opened the bags and let the guys have at it. 

OK, so I didn't get to do things in an orderly fashion: but the guys were remarkably restrained and clearly delighted with the new shirts that had come in. And then I looked over at Gloria. There's a reason why she's nicknamed "Glow" -- she has this million-watt smile that could sell asphalt toothpaste and copper-wire dental floss, and she was totally ecstatic to see the pleasure people were getting. 

It proves a point we've often made here: you think you're ministering to people at The Lord's Rain; it turns out, it's the other way around.

Marty's New Chance - and lucid speakers

I think I've mentioned Marty before in these emails. A teacher whose life was dragged down by drug addiction, he first raised my eyebrows* when he supplied the line, "each man's death diminishes me" after I had quoted John Donne's "No man is an island, entire of himself ...". It was my first glimpse of the level of education among many of the people in the area. It wouldn't be my last.

*(I can only raise both eyebrows: the ability to raise only one, raised to an art form by Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Whimsy and my friend Arlene for comedic effect during an drama exercise, has always eluded me.) 

Marty has had a few false starts on his road back. For a time, it looked like the school district would lift his suspension: that didn't happen; he worked for a time as an advocate through the health region: I'm not sure how that ended. Teaching people is his forte, and not having anyone to teach has been the toughest part, I think. Lately, he's been looking into teaching English as a second language, but that requires certification, certification requires taking courses, and taking courses requires money.

Marty had been searching for grants, scholarships, etc., etc., with no success, but this morning, he had some better news to report.

"The Housing Society (the non-profit group that administers his housing situation) is going to help me," he said. Apparently, he's to take some preliminary courses, receive an honorarium for that, and the deal is, if he plows the honorarium into the tuition fee, the housing society will pay for the rest. "They want to know that I'm serious."

"Praise the Lord," I said. "A second -- another -- chance."

"'Another chance' is right," he said. He's had more than a few and he knows it: one of his enemies through these struggles is that little voice that keeps nattering at him that he's messed-up before, so he'll probably mess up this time. We need to keep Marty in prayer that he'll get that supernatural strength to push past that voice and keep focused on "newness". It's really the only chance any of us has.

===

"I've rarely seen her that lucid."

That observation came from a friend who recently retired from 20-plus years as an advocate for Vancouver's homeless, and we have a lot of mutual friends in the area. The presentation on The Lord's Rain that I delivered in late June includes clips from people who've been involved in the Ministry. That includes the people who come to the place. (The presentation can now be viewed online, and I hope you'll take some time (48 minutes) to check it out. If you would like a DVD copy for your church, home group or organization, please let me know and I'll pop it in the mail for you.)

There are several people I refer to as "fallen geniuses" at The Lord's Rain. Lojas (pronounced like the Spanish "Luis") is one -- a Hungarian fellow who has tried more ways than I can count to find his way of serving the Lord and spreading the Gospel. At Rainbow Mission, he would put on puppet shows of Bible stories, using "puppets" that amounted to pieces of cardboard with appropriate names printed on each (like "SNAKE" for the story of Adam and Eve). He pitched to me a game he had been trying to develop, "Gospel Chess", in which no one defeats the other: since Jesus is about Unity, the idea is not to "take" the other player's pieces but bring them all together as one. I left our meeting understanding one thing: here was a genius -- and a devout and dedicated one -- but something was misfiring.

There are others who are similarly well-spoken, with advanced vocabularies; but there are times when their sentences make no sense. Not to me, anyway. Sometimes they're silly; sometimes they're ranting; often, it's as if they were reading a script made up of unconnected words and phrases, and the writer has written each word on a separate slip of paper and tossed them all into the air.

But when I put them in front of a camera to talk about The Lord's Rain and what it means to them, their expressions become remarkably clear. I think that tells you something about the spiritual impact it has on people. 

Rudy is not one of the "fallen geniuses": he's lucid every time I talk to him. He's not in this presentation, but he said a very important thing about The Lord's Rain a couple of years ago, when CBC TV did a feature on the place. In an interview (and I can't relate this with any kind of false humility), he referred to me and said "he always has time to listen to us." I'd hardly spoken to him up to that point, so he had no way of knowing that I was going through one of those periods of self-doubt, wondering if what I was doing was really doing any good. Somehow, Rudy was moved to say something, and when my friend Gloria, who did the interview, relayed that to me, it was as if the Lord had used Rudy to say to me, "hang in there, kid!"

And now, I'm afraid he's very ill -- more than he's willing to let on. He comes in every morning -- he used to come in with his wife, Audrey, but I haven't seen her in some time (he tells me she's fine, but tends to sleep late) -- and sits quietly with his coffee. He's never asked for anything, but The Lord's Rain has become his "morning place".

A few weeks ago, he told me he had an appointment at an AIDS clinic. "Is it serious?" I asked, which was kind of a stupid question, in retrospect. "I'm fine," he replied. He's never said that he actually has AIDS or what, but it's clear that he's been losing weight rapidly, and that's a very bad sign. But as Jesus has said, sickness -- even a supposedly incurable disease (like death, in the case of His friend Lazarus) -- is an opportunity for God's glory to show, which is why we need to lift Rudy and Audrey up in prayer.