Kicked Out of the Nest

I had a farm in Africa....

Just kidding.

I sit in a booth every day. It's a large-ish booth, roomy, and I can roll my cushy desk chair around to grab binders or pull tobacco out of the drawer or find the biggest towel in the pile. Everything I need for work is in it, and those things don't amount to much! A button to push, some papers to write on and pens to write on them with. Outlets for the laptop. A space heater. My Bible, most days. And the bed sheet (the list of the current residents), which really is the most important thing there.

I have watched a lot of things happen from that desk chair. Today I saw a man and his adult daughter meet for the first time in 5 years. (It was very good.) Once I watched a young man leave on a Friday, pulled down by a restless, scrupulous other (that one still makes me furious), and by the next weekend he had died of an overdose. I have heard roars of laughter from the kitchen, watched a suction-cup ball fall from the skylight after months of hanging on, seen tears of fear, relief, gratitude and heartbreak.

(photo via www.sesamestreet.com)

I don't want to leave it. For someone who has become a bit of a vagabond, leaving anything feels like just another layer of losing. One more time letting go things that have become part of me. In this way, the leaving isn't really about my booth; it is about all the leavings I have had. In another way, though, I feel this leaving specifically and deeply. I am fiercely jealous of whoever sits in the chair next, that they will be able to see James and Dustin and Steve and Scott and Dave and Fred and Mike fight through their next phases in the program. They will see the dark days, when these men walk by the desk without looking, and they will see the light days, when the ribbing and pranks are an outlet for the freedom they are feeling. They will be able to pray for them in the dark and the light. (And they'd better!) They will smile at them, joke with them, listen to them and hear those spectacular and those almost invisible miracles happening.

It's also about seeing men as desperate as Mark was but willing to ask for help, to receive it, to be truly humiliated to the ground so they can rebuild. That means there is hope, that God still does work, that men still do choose His ways over what they can understand, that change can happen.

I have sat in this nest long enough to know that I want to do more than sit. I know my role has been important. But it has been limited; I have had to hold back from asking the questions and doing the listening that could really help change someone's direction. So it's time to go. I know I will learn skills, make connections, and be more usable eventually if I leave, so that someday I can be even more a part of those miracles. And, theoretically, I know that I can't stay there forever, knitting scarves and eating Friday doughnuts and reading books and not really moving forward emotionally and mentally.

But. Many days I just want to.

God, I love these men.