More than We Ever Imagined

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This month, Grace and Main celebrates its tenth anniversary and there must be at least a hundred different ways to tell the story of the last ten years. Every month for nearly eight of those ten years, we’ve brought you a story from our life and work so that you can participate in your own way in our shared life and work. Each of those stories is a piece of a quilt that makes up our experience as an intentional, Christian community devoted to hospitality, prayer, and grassroots, asset-based community development in Danville, Virginia. Some of the stories have been celebrations, some have been sad, but all of them have been honest attempts to articulate this beautiful, good life which we name as a vocation and privilege.

Over the course of ten years, we’ve told lots of stories about addiction because of its prevalence in our city, neighborhoods, and companions. We’ve learned that addiction is an idol that extracts the life from people and places. We’ve learned that relapse is more common than recovery, but that recovery is a beautiful possibility sustained by a hope far greater than our confidence. We’ve learned to see the Kingdom of God in a pile of broken glass and we’ve celebrated so many brothers and sisters who’ve finally gotten clean after months and years of trying. We’ve grappled with our own, sometimes-more-subtle addictions and the things that we too often prefer over God. We’ve found home and community among both the addicted and recovering whom God loves.

We couldn’t tell the story of Grace and Main over ten years without telling the story of Bruce, who first showed up to one of our meals because we pestered him, but who eventually became one of our community’s strongest and most devoted leaders. When he passed in September 2017, he had been clean for two weeks shy of six years. The fruit of Bruce’s labors are everywhere around Grace and Main from the Urban Farm (which he was instrumental in getting started) to the Tool Library (which was his idea) and the dozens of relationships sustained by his kindness, faithfulness, and generosity. Dozens of people were influenced to pursue recovery because of Bruce’s love and inspiration and many cite him as a reason they remain clean even today. Bruce even contributed a couple of stories to this newsletter (here and here). Bruce’s story is wrapped up in ours and we still give thanks with fond remembrances of his time alongside us.

Inspired in large part by Roland, a Grace and Main leader from very near the beginning of our shared life, we’ve been a community that practices radical hospitality in evolving ways. The night after getting his first, stable shelter in years, Roland opened his home to another who had nowhere safe to sleep and, in doing so, also challenged us to take up hospitality with the phrase: “folks need a place to stay.” Following Roland’s lead (and the lead of Joann), we’ve opened our homes to others and found that a shared life is a more beautiful life on the balance. Since 2015, we’ve provided over 20,000 nights of shelter through a variety of methods. We’ve been joined in this work by dozens of friends and partners, including Ascension Lutheran Church who bought and donated a house to our ongoing work. Ten years has meant seeking fluency in the “language of knocks” and trying to learn to greet unexpected guests with grace, mercy, and attention that is all too uncommon.

Any telling of the story of the last ten years of Grace and Main must also devote some time to meals shared together in a wide variety of places like church fellowship halls, apartment complex courtyards, parks, and homes among others. Our practice is to break bread and pass the cup at our meals so that we remember that our tables are meant to be the Lord’s tables and that any and all are welcome to share a meal with Jesus. In ten years, we’ve both hosted meals and accepted the invitations of others to share a meal – part of hospitality is learning how to be a good guest, after all. We’ve wandered neighborhoods with a “roving feast” to share Jesus’ meal wherever we might find someone. We’ve shared extravagant and lavish meals together where we’ve given thanks for God’s providence and the generosity of others, but we’ve also given thanks for the more meager and simple meals we’ve shared. Over ten years, we’ve been bound together by our tables and in the sharing of food.

For about half of our community’s life, we’ve run an Urban Farm on in North Danville, where half of the growing space is dedicated to growing food to share with any who has need or want of it. The other half of the space is plotted out for folks to grow what they want to grow and do what they want to do with what they grow. The substantial majority of the Urban Farm’s leaders are people with direct or previous experience with hunger and/or poverty. There is power in this piece of donated land that was once used as an illegal construction company dump site. Together, we not only grow food to share but also new gardeners, new leaders, and hope. We give thanks for these every bit as much as we give thanks for tomatoes, asparagus, elderberries, and mushrooms.

Ultimately, the story of ten years is best told by the many people who make up our shared life with Grace and Main. Our quilt is made up of people like Alex the Chef, who once prepared a meal unlike any other; Carl, who didn’t have much to give but insisted on giving anyway; Katherine, who made an important pinkie promise; Tyler, who’s looking for us now; Lisa, who doesn’t have to worry what she’d do without us; Jeron, Mongoose, and Greg, who have their own way of making it to our meals; Marcus, who has everything including busted shoes; Marlon, who always remembers to give me a call; Mason, who we know loves us even if he can’t stay with us; Ben, who sometimes preaches with milkshakes, and Meredith, who sometimes preaches with a pillow fight; Derek, who keeps teaching us how to walk; Todd, who’s learning to put his hands to other uses; Tasha, who doesn’t struggle to breath anymore; Kenneth, who reminds us at meals that “God was praised and people were fed” and that there’s not much of a distinction between the two; Ms. Parsons and Ralph, who trust us with precious things; Mike, who sometimes shows up with a truck full of bread or gets caught sleeping on the floor; and Linda, whose garden we’re still tending.

Ten years later, here we are. Life has changed for so many of us. We’ve celebrated new homes, recovery from addiction, confessions of faith, lives well lived, births, birthdays, anniversaries, and God’s grace. We’ve mourned and grieved together over the passing of some of our beloved sisters and brothers. We’ve built new things and revived old things. We’ve commiserated on porches and around campfires, occasionally indulging in a conversation we sometimes call “Grief and Main.” We’ve spent many hours talking about things that matter and many, many more talking about things that don’t matter with people who always matter. We’ve shared life and it has been good.

There’s simply no good way to tell the story of ten years other than saying that it’s a story of a crowd of people—prodigal sons and daughters, all of us—returning home only to find a celebration and a family that is so much more than we ever imagined. ***
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