“It finally hit me, what The Lord’s Rain means,” Ken said on Saturday.
Ken is 60-something and still works as part of the crew that cleans the streets and alleys of Hastings Central. The crew is hired by The Bottle Depot, giving people in the area an opportunity to earn some income – and keep the place reasonably free of trash and needles. Ken is also a fairly quiet, level-headed guy, who was the first to speak up when we announced, a couple of years ago, that we had to limit the number of buns we could give out per person. Taking the attitude of one who was Speaking For The Group, Ken said, “Hey – we understand, and we’re just grateful for this.”
“What does it mean?” I asked him.
“I was in here the other day, and I suddenly felt this ‘tingling’ all over me. I hadn’t felt that since I first got saved, and suddenly I realized – ‘The Lord’s Rain’!”
In other words, His Spirit, pouring out on us.
How about that? A triple-entendre! The name was initially coined by Judy Babcook, Barry’s wife. She handed me a slip of paper at the Gospel Mission Christmas dinner in 2007, when the facility was barely under construction. “How about ‘The Lord’s Rain’?” it read. “Oh, very cute,” I said to myself, rather indulgently. “A nice play on ‘reign’ and ‘showers’. It will do as a ‘working title’, until we can think of something better.”
Good one, Drew! Judy’s name stuck, and CTV reporter Peter Grainger picked up on it when he did a report on the project. “It’s like a baptism, isn’t it?” he asked during an interview.
We certainly have the Holy Spirit sitting over our little Mission, but the smell coming from Pigeon Park was anything but holy. Ken had been the first to report it, and then Jeet came in and told us about it. Someone, they said, had pried the lid off a sewer manhole cover and was digging in the muck. Ken figured they were trying to find bits of rock cocaine to smoke. “That’s what happens when you get addicted,” Danilo pointed out. “Nothing else matters – not food, not being clean – all you can think of is getting more drugs, more drugs, more drugs!”
“Not that they ever find anything,” Ken said, “but you never know, right?” He laughed.
Truly, that was one of my first lasting images of the area around Gospel Mission: people practically bent double, searching the street for what might be a little white piece of rock, but more often than not, was guano.
I went outside to have a look. I couldn’t see if a manhole cover had been disturbed, but there was a fellow, sitting amid a pile of muck with an overturned bin beside him, picking through it with his bare hands. The muck contained dozens of discarded hypodermic needles.
I went back in and called the police non-emergency line. I told them what I saw and that I’d heard a sewer had been accessed. The call-taker gave me the number for the needle-exchange service so I called them and left a message. Then I went out to see if I could find where the manhole cover had been pulled off, and I had another look at the fellow in the muck. He resembled nothing so much as those images you see of children in a Third World country, playing on piles of garbage.
I called the police again. “I think we may have a mental health issue here,” I said. I’m sure the call-taker had to resist the temptation to say, “What was your first clue, Sherlock?” Instead, she pointed out that police were already en route. I looked out the window and saw the black unmarked cruiser parked across the street. One of the officers was chatting with the guy from the pile and his partner was standing guard. After a while, the guy walked away, and I went over to the cops.
“We assessed him,” one said. “He doesn’t appear to be a danger to himself or others, so we had to let him go.” He anticipated my next point. “I know: digging with your bare hands in a pile of sewage with needles doesn’t sound like a sane person,” he said with a tinge of irony, “but we’d need more to hold him.”
Sad.
***
Police have identified a suspect in the breakin and attempted theft at The Lord’s Rain in late May. The investigating officer told me the chap’s name (which, my newsroom background reminds me, I can’t mention until he’s actually charged) but I don’t recognize it. I’ve asked police if some of us from the Mission can meet with him after the judicial system has done its thing – could be an opportunity to turn a negative situation into a positive one; certainly we would like to tell him we forgive him.
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