A Hard Day on the Street, and the Harder Work in the Heart
Today was a hard day.
Not the kind of hard that comes from cold weather or a busy night at the table — the deeper kind.
The kind that doesn’t come from serving food, but from shouldering the emotional weight of human brokenness.
Running this ministry isn’t just warm smiles and hot drinks.
It’s logistics.
It’s people management.
It’s coordination, driving, scheduling, last-minute crises, and the invisible labour that no one sees.
And it’s coming to terms with this humbling truth:
in the vast ocean of suffering, we are only a tiny drop of relief.
That reality weighs heavy.
Tonight was one of those nights.
The Complicated Road to London
We were trying to help Gary get back to London — a step toward something resembling stability.
But he was late this evening.
Late enough that the driver missed the Toronto connection entirely.
For people who live organized, scheduled lives, something like this feels frustrating.
Painfully preventable.
A “simple” task made unnecessarily complicated.
But then I saw the other side.
Before he arrived, Gary had shaved.
He’d cleaned up.
He had gotten new clothes from a local outreach.
And he had called his granddaughter to tell her he was finally coming home.
I stood there and watched him make the call.
Suddenly, what seemed like a small, manageable task — “get back to London” — became a window into how difficult even the simplest things can be for someone living in chaos, trauma, and survival mode.
So the decision was made:
Drive him directly to Toronto to catch the later connection.
He slept most of the way.
And that left me with a lot of time to think.
The Inner Battle
On the long drive home, the doubts crept in:
Was any of this worth it?
Are we actually helping?
Or just enabling?
Are we doing good — or only doing something?
Are we being used by a system we don’t understand?
These are the questions no one wants to say out loud,
but everyone who serves eventually asks.
And then came the harder question:
Do I think I’m supposed to fix people?
Do I have a savior complex?
That’s when the spiritual slap hit.
Because the truth is simple and uncomfortable:
I am not Gary’s savior.
I am not responsible for changing his life.
I can’t fix what only God can heal.
Any attempt to measure today by the world’s metrics — efficiency, success, results — misses the entire point of Christian service.
We play the short game.
God plays the long game.
And trusting that long game is what makes service so hard.
The Only Thing That Matters
Service is not always clean.
It is not efficient.
It is not neat, organized, or predictable.
And it is certainly not outcome-guaranteed.
Service reveals how little control we have —
and how dependent we are on God to move where we cannot.
At the end of days like this, we come back to the question that strips away all illusions of control:
“What would Jesus do?”
Not as a slogan —
but as a reminder that inconvenience is part of discipleship.
Would He have stepped into a messy, complicated, emotionally draining situation?
Without hesitation.
Would He have served someone with Gary’s past?
He already did — over and over again.
So we can’t measure today by outcomes.
We measure it by obedience.
Gary reached out to us.
God put him in our path.
We responded as best we could — weakly, imperfectly, but faithfully.
And now, the rest belongs to God.
“And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.”
— Galatians 6:9 (ESV)
A Final Word
I don’t know if today was “successful.”
I don’t know if Gary will change.
I don’t know if his family will be helped or hurt by this.
We may never know.
But I do know this:
Tonight, Gary had hope — even if for a moment.
He reached out to us.
He trusted us.
And we showed up.
The rest is in God’s hands — where it belongs.
Service isn’t about fixing lives.
It’s about faithfulness, obedience, and trust in a God who plays the long game when all we can see is the short one.
It’s hard to trust blindly.
But that’s what makes service sacred.
Please pray for Gary, and please pray for our volunteers —
for strength, wisdom, discernment, and hearts anchored not in outcomes, but in Christ.
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