Janet's Victory

“What is this place?” the new woman asked.

“It’s The Lord’s Rain,” Janet explained. “We provide showers for people who need them; we also have coffee if you want some.”

“Hmm,” the new woman said. “Can I have a shower?”

“Sure!”

“Hold on: I’ll be right back.”

The new woman left, and Janet thought, “maybe she will – maybe she won’t,” and got on with the task of overseeing Ladies’ Day on Monday.

But the new woman did come back. “I gave her the soap and shampoo,” Janet said later, “and two towels, because she has long hair and I know what it’s like, having long hair.”

It is now a year since Janet Klassen stepped into the role of Assistant Pastor at Gospel Mission and overseer of The Lord’s Rain. The experience has been yet another “W” in a string of personal victories in her life, dealing with many of the same issues that afflict people on the Downtown East Side; applying her own experiences to helping others through theirs.

For the record, Janet can be found at 327/331 Carrall Street:

•          Monday mornings for Ladies’ Day at The Lord’s Rain
•          Monday evenings for Movie Night at Gospel Mission
•          Wednesday mornings for The Lord’s Rain
•          Wednesday night for the weekly prayer meeting at Gospel Mission (for which she bakes goodies for snack time)
•          Thursday morning at The Lord’s Rain
•          Every other Friday night to teach Bible Study at Gospel Mission
•          Sunday afternoon for the service at Gospel Mission
•          Sunday night for The Rock Church (which meets at Gospel Mission)

Hmm ... she doesn’t seem to have anything happening on Tuesdays or Saturdays. We’ll have to see about that.

Janet grew up in the church, beginning with an Anglican Church in Mission, where she was teaching Sunday school by age 15. “Our mother told us (she has two older sisters) that we each had to do something in the church,” she says. When her parents moved to a Full Gospel church, Janet stayed with the Anglican Church, as she wasn’t comfortable in a Pentecostal setting. But it was at the Full Gospel church that her parents met Barry Babcook, and Barry and Janet’s father wound up working together at Samaritan Inn, a recovery house for addicts. Janet met a young man at Samaritan Inn, and they started going together, coming into Vancouver for Sunday services at Gospel Mission, and that began the connection that remains to this day – 14 years later. In 2002, she started Movie Night, showing a Christian-themed movie – anything from blockbusters like “Jesus of Nazareth” or “The Passion of the Christ” to non-theatrical releases about the lives of the Apostles.

But all that time, Janet battled severe emotional issues. They landed her in Riverview Mental Institution for a year in 2000 and led to numerous hospital stays and suicide attempts over the years. It reached a point where her father took her to Barry and said, “Here – you do something with her.” That set Janet on the path that has led her to where she is now.

She is able to talk about it, because each attempt on her own life was headed off by a miraculous move of God. There was the Tylenol incident, for example.

“I was in a parking lot, and grabbed a handful of Tylenol and started gulping them down,” she says. “Just then, my psychiatrist came along, saw me, and hauled me away.” The parking lot was five blocks away from the shrink’s office and the doctor “just happened” to decide to go for a walk at that time.

Janet recalls, “I said to her, ‘what made you come here?’ ‘God,’ she said.”

On another occasion, Janet started to slip into an “episode” during one of our Bible studies at the Mission. She went into Barry’s office. Barry had recognized the signs and went in after her. He came out a moment later and said to me, “go find a cop. We need to get her committed and the police can do it right away.”

I went outside. The Downtown East Side is certainly not without police presence, but there are times when, as the old saying goes, you can’t find a cop when you need one. This was not one of those times. I took two steps away and ran into two officers who had just confiscated a Samurai sword from one of the drug dealers.

I explained the situation and the pair – a man and a woman – came upstairs. They went into Barry’s office to try to talk to her. Then the man came out and motioned to Barry and me to come into the kitchen. “I was a youth pastor,” he said, “and from my experience, I’d say this was possession.” Barry and I looked at each other: of all the cops to come into the Mission, we got the one that understood the situation.

The policeman went back into the office and talked to Janet in Christian terms, and a short time later, they led her out.

And then there was the Granville Bridge incident. Janet had been sent to Vancouver General Hospital in another episode, and actually climbed onto the railing at mid-span. She let go. But a policewoman was on the scene and grabbed her. “Oh, no, you don’t!” she said as she hauled Janet back.

“You will die when God says it’s time for you to die,” Barry told her later.

“I’ve learned that the big problem I’ve had,” Janet says, “is abandonment issues. If I think I’m being left alone, I freak. And you see, that’s what so many people on the Downtown East Side experience. They’ve been left alone, and we try to show them that they’re not alone.

“The Lord’s Rain is so different from Gospel Mission. You get fewer Christians coming in, for one thing: you get hard people from the Street, people from all walks of life who need help – not from preaching, but people who just need coffee and a hug and some love. In a way, they’re easier to reach than people at the Mission. People at the Mission have heard it all before. People at The Lord’s Rain are often surprised by the love.”

Teaching Bible study has been an eye-opener for Janet. “We’re currently studying James,” she says, “which has been a real challenge for us.” Her Bible studies are interactive – she works from resource materials from Max Lucado’s Ministry and invites questions and comments all through the teaching. About 15 people come to the lessons.

“[The questions] are very intelligent: We were talking about ‘taming the tongue’ (James 3:1-10), and Marty said, ‘what about when you don’t say something that you should?’ So that got me thinking and now I’m challenged to speak up when I might not otherwise. Jesus spoke up when He was on the earth: I need to do the same.” She reflected, and added, “They teach me more than I teach them.”

Janet has been the one to “get through” to some people that others cannot. Gary, for example, spends much of his time mumbling to himself and when he does reach out into the world of the Rest Of Us, the sentences are disjointed and filled with images of violence, mob hits and conspiracies. Somehow, Janet is the one person who is able to communicate with Gary. In the same way, she was close to Barry Smith, whom I wrote about last year when he passed away, and was listed as “next of kin” on the hospital documents.

Much of her own victory – she hasn’t been in hospital since last November – has come as she’s moved into her role as Assistant Pastor and taken on the management of The Lord’s Rain. “Taking on more responsibility and thinking of others rather than myself has been the best thing,” she says. The confidence and self-assuredness she’s gained is propelling her towards a new chapter, training -- through the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority -- as a Peer Support Worker. That training, plus the dedication, love and light of Christ she carries wherever she goes, will bless more and more people in ways we could never imagine.

The Apostle Paul writes (2 Corinthians 2:14) “Now thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place.”

Yep – that’d be Janet, alright.