May 18 was an exciting day for me. My son was finally able to resume his physical therapy sessions that had been suspended for several weeks during the Safer at Home initiative. When he first started outpatient therapy in February, I had been able to sit in the waiting room until time to take him home, but because COVID 19 prevention measures are now required, I have to leave the building after completing any required paperwork. I was told that if I remained on the premises, I could spend the two hours that he is in therapy in the uncovered courtyard or in my car. Since I knew that most surrounding businesses were not open to the public, I opted to wait at home, where I have HVAC, 2 bathrooms, hot and cold running water, and a full refrigerator. The only negative is that I have to make an extra trip to the hospital in my air-conditioned car. Poor me, right?

While considering this minor inconvenience, I realized that our women—who already have more burdens than we could imagine—are now subject to these additional restrictions that make their daily lives even more difficult. Facilities that had once been open to them are now closed, and they have none of the comfortable options that I have. Their options for something as simple as washing their hands are greatly reduced, at a time when handwashing is being emphasized as the first line of defense against infectious diseases. It hardly seems possible, but our women are living with even less privacy than they had when we first began to meet with them on Summer Avenue. And as if all of this weren’t enough, the civil unrest that has erupted in the past week adds even more complications, with curfews and increased police presence.

But what can we do? It won’t help for us to sit in our well-equipped homes and hope our women will find a way to manage these additional difficulties. The assistance that Sandra is currently providing in the form of food and supplies is a start, but it by no means addresses our women’s complex set of physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. Having a drop-in center will provide so many more opportunities to assist the women in an organized manner with food, water, counseling, and community.  Even if we are unable to congregate for a few weeks, we will have a permanent location for the handwashing station that A Lee Dog Story has donated to us. We will also be able to store food and make it available more often. Our volunteers will have a safe space in which to work, and our women will have one place on this sad earth that they will know they are always welcome. It will be their north star, something to count on as they have been able to count on Sandra during these past few dreadful weeks.

Whether we have a physical location or not, we are a community, the Lisieux Community, and love lives here. When we are able to realize the vision of the drop-in center that we’ve described in previous blog entries, we will need to have a sign over the door that says exactly that. Love, with no strings attached. Love that wants only the best for each other. Love that turns strangers into friends and friends into family.

We are the Lisieux Community, and love lives here.

We bring you now to the final room in our virtual tour. As we open the door to the dining room, we ask you to recall that we started in the kitchen, which we called the most important room of the house; this is true because food is the most basic human need. Simply put, we die without sustenance. It is such a basic need that we started our ministry to a few women on the streets last fall by taking them food. Every Thursday evening, we now serve an evening meal and snacks-for-later to about 25 women in a parking lot.

So if we’re already feeding the women weekly, what difference will a dining room make? The surface answer is that even if food were the only focus of our work, we would greatly prefer to see our women eating their meals seated comfortably around a table indoors instead of huddled around a van in the heat, cold, and rain. Would you enjoy having to brave the elements just to have your hunger satisfied?

Although that would be enough of a reason to have a dining room, there is much more to it than that. In our very souls, we understand that a meal taken in community is not just about the food. From ancient times until now, breaking bread together has been a symbol unity, of conflict ended, of paradise restored. Sharing a meal with friends around a bountiful table is a way of feeding both the body and the spirit. Meals served at the Lisieux drop-in center will be eaten around a table blessed by love for each and all, where the benefit of the feast is not determined by the richness of the food but by the sweetness of the fellowship in which it is enjoyed.

Fostering community by building trust has been a major theme throughout our description of the drop-in center. Indeed, the concept of community has been an integral part of our organization since the beginning—so much so that we made it part of our name. We started this new ministry knowing that building trust with the women was the key to seeing them persist in the long difficult process of recovery. Therefore, we can find no better way to complete our description of the center than to quote the saint for whom our community is named. In one of her letters, St Therese of Lisieux said, “Trust and trust alone should lead us to love.”

Please pray with us that the God who is Love itself will provide us a facility where the women who are now on the streets can learn to live in ways that promote individual and corporate health in a community of real love.

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The rooms we have described thus far on our virtual tour can be found in any residence. But now we bring you to the rooms that distinguish the drop-in center from an ordinary home. These are offices in which women can access additional services beyond food and supplies. Memphis has many excellent non-profit organizations that meet various needs, and our strategy has always been to collaborate with those services to assist our women. For example, we have taken some of our women for health screenings with the Shelby County Health Department, and we recently worked with Baptist Women’s Health Services to provide mobile mammography services. We have helped some of the obtain identification because that is a basic need for obtaining housing and legitimate employment. Some of the women have asked for help with addiction, and we have assisted them with placement in a recovery program. Our program is already much more than meals and supplies delivered on Thursday nights.

Although we can continue to feed our women in a parking lot and connect them with local services as they request it, we will be able to coordinate these efforts more consistently with the center as our hub of operations. Visiting health care workers will provide some basic services onsite, with referrals to clinical services as needed.  We will also have a social worker to assess each woman’s situation and recommend the services she needs. Although our women have much in common, each one is an individual and should be treated as such. Most important, since our program is based on trauma-informed care principles, our staff and volunteers will all operate from those principles.

You see, we believe it would be irresponsible of us to meet only the immediate physical needs of our women without also offering them a way to process the underlying cause of their circumstances. We contend that women do not choose to be homeless and hungry, to neglect their health, to become addicted, to sell their bodies, unless that is the only choice they can see. The path to life on the streets almost always begins with trauma, and sadly, that life exposes our women to additional trauma. Unless they are given the opportunity to break that cycle, they will never find the road to healing. So we will provide onsite opportunities for those who are ready to leave the streets to access professional services that will assist them in that process.

Will you pray with us that the God whose Son came to heal the brokenhearted and bind up their wounds will provide a suitable place for our women to meet with trained professionals who can help them begin to process through the trauma in their past so that they may find hope and healing?

Over the past few weeks we’ve taken you through several rooms of our anticipated drop-in center, all of which have met some practical purpose to serve a very basic need (meals, showers, laundry). The Living Room is our next stop, and it will also meet a need and serve a purpose, though not one that everyone might see as practical at first. But we would contend that having a safe, private place where we can continue to build community among the women and volunteers is imminently practical to their spirits. A living room is intended to be a place to deepen our connections with family and friends. Secluded from the view of the hostile world and safe from the tyranny of bad weather, our women can take some time to relax and get to know each other better.

We do our best to build community when we visit with the women on Thursday nights, but if you’ve read any of our accounts of those visits, you know that there is a fair amount of chaos and absolutely no privacy. It is therefore difficult for them to let down their guard. Although—and perhaps because—they are eminently vulnerable, they try very hard to appear tough, which sometimes creates additional problems for them.

Granted, four walls, a sofa, and some chairs will not solve all of our women’s problems, but having such a home-like setting even for a few hours a week will give a welcome air of normality to their lives. As busy as we all are, the living room is still for most people a place of fellowship. Think of the times that you’ve gathered around a coffee table to play a game, watch a movie, or just talk about how your day went. Those shared moments of kinship give you strength and help prepare you to deal with the stresses of life.

You can see, then, how providing a place where our women can have those kinds of moments will help them develop healthy friendships built on solid foundations and mutual trust, with no strings attached. Such friendships will prepare the women for the hard work of meeting with counselors to face their trauma and begin to heal. When they are able to be vulnerable to those who will lovingly support them through the healing process, they will become less vulnerable to those whose only desire is to exploit them. That in itself makes the drop-in center living room a very practical place indeed.

Now we ask again: How can you help us make this vision a reality?

Will you pray with us that the God who created us in his image and said that it was not good for us to be alone, would provide a place where our women can develop true friendships that will support them in the long and difficult process of healing from trauma?

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