It was while I was sitting in our weekly prayer meeting one Monday night when I first saw them. They were faces. I saw faces peering through the huge glass windows of our storefront at The 180 Center. So many faces. They were the countenances of people who were hungry and longing. Yearning for warmth…
Working with broken people can be challenging. Not everyone has the patience for people who seem desperate for help one day, but walk out the door a week later because they want to eat brown rice instead of white rice! When we first started working with homeless and addicted people, we had no idea the…
“Help me—help you—help him!” urged the 911 operator last week in New Haven, Connecticut. On the other line was Dave, a 2015 graduate of The 180 Center Discipleship Program. It was all surreal. Dave stopped in to chat with Jerry, a fellow tenant in the Christian living sober house. Jerry was grateful for the bed…
My stomach felt unsettled and my mind was fast forwarding through every possible escape route I could imagine. The hand of regret wrapped around my throat, squeezed every anticipated breath from my chest and robbed me of hope for redemption. It was a horrible, speeding, out-of-control roller coaster that I recently boarded and there was…
When Mike and I first came to Connecticut, we attended Gateway Christian Fellowship in West Haven, experiencing passionate worship and compelling preaching. With a missions background, we were eager to get involved in outreach. We discovered our call serving food at the men’s shelter in New Haven twice a month. It felt fulfilling to prepare…
In elementary school I won the spelling bee for my school district. I won on the word achieve. I will never forget that day. A local newspaper snapped a photo of me holding my trophy, smiling from ear to ear, standing next to my parents and Mr. Fairman, my favorite teacher in the world. The…
We were restless. Mike owned a successful landscape company, our kids brought us great joy and drove us crazy; we enjoyed being active in our church and doing community outreaches, but we felt as if there was something more for us. We talked about going to a YWAM Crossroads Mission School in Hawaii. This…
We weren’t exactly thrilled when we moved to New Haven. We had a wonderful white picket fence life near the beach in Blue Point, Long Island. We lived in the home of our dreams. Most of all, we were comfortable. New Haven, through our eyes at the time, was quite different. It was city life that…
