As the year draws to a close there are a lot of changes happening in the community. Several people in the 'Opstaap' program are moving on. Some are leaving us entirely, for various reasons. Others will still be around, but are moving to more independent housing outside the main house as they continue the process of figuring out their lives. We wish them all the best.
Meanwhile, there are new people coming in. It's funny how people find us. Some of course come in through approved, official channels - they are referred to us by the government or some sort of program or shelter - but it seems that fairly often they just stumble across us. They come in through the window rather than the door, you might say.
A recent example: one night Marco and I were in the kitchen watching a movie on TV when one of the doctors from the Kruispost, the medical clinic in the basement, knocked on the door. She had in tow a patient - a mother with a young boy. While treating the mother for a fever the doctor discovered that the two of them didn't have a place to stay for the night. So she brought them around.
They stayed for a couple of nights while arrangements were made for them and then they left (the mother completely recovered, by the way). And now, a week or two later, they're back to stay for a while! So you can see the way things tend to work around here.
Also in the realm of the unplanned - the sudden turnover around here. There's no rule, as far as I know, that everybody has to be out by the end of the year. That's just the way it has worked out. Hopefully folks are moving on to bigger and better things, getting their lives back together and charting a new course for themselves. And new folks will come in through the doors and windows to replace them.
In the meantime, things are a little bit quieter around here.
On a purely meditative note: it occurred to me yesterday that living in different countries is a really good way to observe the different forms that grace can take. I've experienced faith related work in China, in Haiti, and now in Amsterdam. And it seems as though in each place they experience grace differently.
In China, the grace they need is freedom. Freedom from political oppression and millennia old traditions that have bound that people in servitude. In Haiti, the grace they need is the day-to-day necessities of survival. And here in the Red Light District, a different kind of grace again. A grace to overcome addictions and troubled pasts and all the baggage that life in the modern world can saddle us with.
In each place I've seen radically different people with radically different needs. In spite of this, I believe that the same grace covers all of them. If it looks different from place to place and person to person, that's just because we in our human limitations can only perceive a small part of it at a time.
What a great motivation to travel, though! If we stay at home in our own comfortable spaces we might never get to see all these many other faces of grace. We might think that God worked the same way, every time, for every person. And that would be a tragedy, because my experience of him is that he is so much bigger than that!
Grace is bigger than we are. It's not defined by our limited perspectives. It's wildly different from person to person and from nation to nation. And you can't truly begin to understand that without experiencing it for yourself.
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