One Year at Hope House

We lose track of our humble beginnings at our homeless ministry, Hope House. I think that one of the reasons why it is so difficult to track our birthday is that we were always doing things as soon as we could. We didn't wait to have a grand opening when everything was finished. We housed our first homeless man, not because we had one room completed and ready to be inhabited, but because we had a man leaving a program that would have returned to his storage unit if we had not offered him the room. The rehabilitation of the Hope House buildings took months and could only be tracked by payments for supplies and labor.

But today turns out to be an easy opportunity for an anniversary. For today is the first anniversary of The Book of Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Radicals. One year ago today, November 30, 2010, was the release party of this book of liturgical prayer. I had actually signed up to host a release party at the Hope House location before I owned it. Talk about living into your reality. I knew that those hosting release parties would get free copies of the book, and I wanted to make this prayer resource available to homeless men in a program across town. The first event at Hope House was this release party. By the time of the party I had discovered that I was in way over my head in terms of my ability to provide a competent liturgical showing, with music and songs that were part of other release parties. As a result I invited only a handful of people, and a few showed up. It was certainly an opportunity to show people the book, and a new way to think about prayer, but it turned out to be an excellent first showing of Hope House. With walls freshly painted and a newly donated table just moved into the dining room, sans chairs, Hope House was, on the inside at least, like a shiny new penny.

So we celebrate this season of anniversary for Hope House remembering that this is the season that we began providing housing to our first homeless man, when we first opened the house to visitors, and soon, (probably this coming weekend) the first anniversary of a Hope House outreach morning. Happy one year anniversary to Hope House!