From Sarah

It’s come to my attention in the past couple days that I am often an incredibly impatient person.  And when I occasionally get over that, God does things I don’t expect.

Twice this week, I’ve had the opportunity to hang out in our clothing room with a young lady who wasn’t in a hurry.  Both times, I’ve spent about 45 minutes just sitting, talking, joking, commenting on silly clothing items, and being surprised by the things that can come out of a young woman’s mouth when she doesn’t have her guard up.

The first time was with a young lady who is 20 and in her last trimester of pregnancy, and who I’ve known for probably six of the seven years I’ve been at CCW.  She half-joked that she is in her “nesting” phase, and because she’s homeless and sleeping outside, she took out her nesting urges by looking at and re-folding literally every women’s shirt and pair of pants in our clothing room.  Drop-in was slow, so I just sat in the room with my feet up while she “nested” and picked her brain about anything and everything that came to mind.  In the process, she told me about her struggles with forgiveness of a family member who abused her as a child, and about how she believes that “as much as you forgive other people, God will forgive you,” because it’s what the bible says.  She told me about how she wishes she’d never done drugs and how it sometimes scares her to remember that God knows everything about her and she can’t hide from him.  She also told me that she didn’t understand why I wanted to hang out with “all these hoodlums down here,” and that she saw and others view me as an older sister.

The second time was with another young lady who is 21 and deals with some mental illness as well as drug addiction.  Taking her to the clothing bank is typically not an experience I look forward to because of her compulsive and borderline kleptomaniac tendencies (and my control issues).  Normally this turns into a painful struggle of willpower and ends with her loud and angry and with me frustrated.  This particular time I decided in advance that I would pick my battles and let her just “do her thing” as much as possible, without being rushed or micromanaged.  What ended up happening was a long, funny, disjointed conversation between the two of us as she stuffed about 20 advertising t-shirts, 8 ugly ball caps, 12 cheap toothbrushes, 16 packets of shampoo, and a whole array of other random items into a giant leather purse that looked like a bowling bag.  I took a really deep breath and held my tongue on any items I knew other kids probably wouldn’t want anyway.  I also tried to avoid asking her too many direct questions about her personal life because I know it’s often overwhelming to her.  Instead, I commented on shirts she found, asked her silly questions about colors she liked or places she wanted to visit, and shared goofy stories about my coworkers.  Amazingly, under these circumstances she started volunteering things far more profound than anything I had asked.  She mentioned how painful it was for her to have her son in someone else’s custody and not to get to see him, and how the fact that she was on unsupervised probation and needed to keep a clean record was difficult because she didn’t like to feel like a “good kid” all the time.  At one point, digging through the shampoo drawer, she stopped and said to me, “Why don’t you call my mom and tell her ‘Jane’s stealing all our shampoo because she’s so miserable that she doesn’t have her kid.  Will you give him back now?’”

The funny thing about both of these experiences is how very lazy I felt in both cases….either not doing my job because I’m just sitting while someone else folds clothes, or not doing my job because I just let one girl walk out with 20 t-shirts and I was too tired to have the argument.  And yet, I saw that in my uselessness God can use me.  Maybe there is something about being unproductive and unhurried that makes others feel more comfortable around me.  Whatever it is, it has caused me to be astounded at the depth of thought that can be expressed by a young woman who probably is not frequently asked what she thinks about things.  And it makes me wish that I had started listening sooner.