Received this email from The Wayside Chapel. For those not familiar, this is a charity support group for the homeless based in Sydney’s red-light district. I thought it carried quite a nice message:
Dear Inner Circle,
| Mother’s Day arrives this Sunday. For some, it’ll be a warm moment perhaps with flowers, a long phone call and breakfast in bed. For many of our people, it arrives like a lead weight, marking loss and a love denied. If you’ve known the embrace of a mother who was present and safe, that is worth holding gently this week. It is a boundary that seems natural, so when it is broken, it so easily breaks us. A little while ago, a young man found himself in Kings Cross after his mother was murdered while she was working. He took off from a foster home, where a local “businessman” soon found him and took him under his wing. His life became a transaction — he would drop off drugs and money in exchange for accommodation. That accommodation was in the basement of one of the man’s establishments. Each night, from the age of ten until he left at seventeen, one of the working girls would be sent down to him. Most minds would leap to the worst conclusion. Instead, each night, he would ask them to cook for him, and to then sit together to eat, after which he would request they read to him and then lie beside him until he fell asleep. These women became his mothers. He called them all Mum, and he loved them as they loved him. At Wayside one day, a friend of mine was sitting with him when he began staring across the room. A woman turned around, saw him, and her face lit up with recognition. She rushed over and whispered his name. He replied with a quiet smile that rose from somewhere deep. “Mum?” It was a beautiful reunion. In that moment, it was Mother’s Day again. We know that feeling. The longing to be wanted. To hold and be held. It comes, sometimes, in the most unexpected ways — a basement kitchen, a whispered name. Sometimes Wayside serves as a reminder that in the unlikely places, life can be found anew. That worst assumptions can be shattered by the tenderness of love. Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle, Rev. Jon Owen CEO & Pastor Wayside Chapel |
THE RICHARD OF OZ 
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