Often, my clients will say “when things get better, when I get a job, when I finish school then I will give back to Hope House”. Many of our clients bring in donations of used clothing as their children outgrow them, or bits and pieces of household items they no longer need. We even have some single men who will use their meager food stamps to buy food for our Food Pantry!
The clients who tear at my heart are those men who cannot look up because they are so ashamed of having to ask for help. They usually speak in quiet voices full of pain and bewilderment, about having never had to ask for help in their lives. Also painful are the women who have had their lives torn apart by domestic violence or abandonment: they have no idea how to start over and what happened to their life.
What do these two paragraphs have in common? They both speak to my personal philosophy of how and why we do what we do at Hope House—I call it the Circle of Life (I know that’s already taken, but who cares?). My Circle of Life means we are all accountable to God for each other. We are part of the same family of God and we should be helping each other all the way through life. If we don’t, how are we going to be able to get through it? We are called to be God to one another, so it doesn’t matter where we are on the circle—giving or receiving—we are all on the circle (the journey we call life) together. I tell my clients we are here to help each other and they can help when it is their turn.
Right now I am just riding the circle through life!
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