From day to day, I never know who will show up or how many. Some days it’s a dozen. Other days 25 people gather to eat and connect. We check in on each other, notice who we haven’t seen in a few days, offer encouragement, and eat yummy food.
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love gang
One of our young #lovegang guys loudly complained, “Fruit in meat. That’s just not right. I don’t do fruit in meat.” I asked him if he had tried it before. He said, “I don’t need to try it. I know fruit don’t go in meat. My mom always made tuna salad . . .” and he went on to loudly proclaim what things belong in tuna salad.
(Excerpt from Beloved Chaos. “Chuck” died in his sleep on the back porch of Joe’s Addiction on May 24th, 2019. He died at home.)
A couple of minutes later, a Love Gang guy came to me and said, “I’m going out there. She just looked through the window with that ‘Rescue me’ look in her eye.”
He pulled up his sleeve and extended his arm toward me. Tracks marked the inside of his arm. He pulled up the other sleeve and swiped his fingers over the red places.
They overheard a woman (who is also part of our Community) in distress. A man was in her tent, and she was shouting, “No. Stop! Get off me!”
So . . . I did a thing. I got a tattoo. On my face.
It’s a very public space, and most everybody knows if you leave something, it’s kind of at your own risk. So the barista reminded her of that, to which she turned and said to everyone in the room, “This is my food. I’m coming back for it. Nobody eat it. K?”
The policeman stepped out of his car, and the young man who had called breathlessly rattled his complaint. “These guys are gonna beat me! They threatened to hit me! I didn’t do nothing to them, but they’re gonna kill me! Some of them are Juggalos and some of them are Crips. They’re gonna kill me!”
One of the more frustrating elements of ministry at Joe’s is the complexity of the roots of problems. We daily encounter these plus the worldview and value system that is inherent to generational poverty. Add to these the ingredients of drug addiction and mental illness, and otherwise simple needs become recipes for extreme frustration.