I found her quite fascinating.

Wednesday, March 28th, 2007

I woke up this morning feeling happy. It was a good emotion to feel after yesterdays ups and downs. My social work class required me to do a project on a place that offered social services and my partner, Sharon, had chosen the Bayview extended care just down the street from the place I was staying at. I got there a bit earlier than Sharon and found myself surrounded by older people sitting here and there in the reception area. I felt a little intimidated at first, what would I say? I wanted so much to connect to these people, to be able to them and perhaps be a witness of Christ to them. Sharon arrived shortly after and we met with Elisha, the social worker there, to discuss questions and get a tour and a feel for the place. As we were walking I felt this overwhelming love for these people and I knew that Jesus had placed it in me. Elisha introduced us to a woman named Agnes who usually showed off her room to people who were visiting as she had added some of her things to make it homey. As we stood there in this tiny space, with bits and pieces of her home life around the room, listening to her explain how hard it was to transition because you miss your own place, I felt so weighed down by it all, and I could feel tears pricking at my eyes. I don’t attribute these tears to the emotional state that I’ve been in lately, but to something much deeper; I felt as if Jesus was letting me into His heart for this woman, and it pained me to see her stuck in this place. We said our goodbyes and just before we left the room, I turned back and told her that I really admired her strength for adjusting to this place and being able to make it her own. She said it was all about the attitude and I wanted to cry for her, for this situation she was in, simply because she was old.

The next distinct lady that we visited was Mrs. Mulloch, a lady who shared a room with another woman named Rachel. We came in to find her sitting on her bed, bright red lipstick tracing her lips, and a necklace of bright blue beads around her neck. She answered questions about living there, how she enjoyed it, and how she and Rachel got along although she had very different backgrounds, as Rachel was born in North Africa, and Mrs. Mulloch in Canada. We left her to finish off the tour and ended up back at the waiting room where I met an older man named Arthur who was from England. I mentioned that I was born in England also and he smiled, revealing a few twisted, and typically English teeth. We talked about how long we had lived there for a bit and then Elisha came back to give us the final pieces of info that we needed. I wanted so badly to go back and talk to Agnes one-on-one as she had been so bright and brave in her homey little room. Elisha seemed suprised that we simply wanted to go back and talk but she relented and took us back to Agnes’s and Mrs. Mulloch’s room. Agnes’s door was closed so I went to talk to Mrs. Mulloch while Sharon went off to talk to someone else.

At first our conversation was stifled by the formality of my visit. She wanted to know what information I needed exactly, where I was there, and who did I work for. After answering her questions, I began to ask her about herself, her background. She answered my questions but told me I’d have to speak more directly and be specific, and it became obvious to me that she considered my visit only part of a requirement. I told her, I’m interested in you, in those pretty blue beads you’re wearing. That comment sparked a story about a play she’d been to once where she sat in the front row and the actress afterwards told her that those blue beads had been something she’d fixated her eyes on the whole play. It was so neat to get this piece of story out of her. She found it humourous that I was so interested in her, but didn’t seem to understand still what I wanted to know. She told me that her son and his family had gone to America for a week and put her in the care centre so that she would eat well, and when they came back, she had to give up her car as her son didn’t want her to get in any accidents, and it was really hard to give up driving, and that after she had ended up staying here because the care was so much better than what she could do for herself on her own. I asked her about what job she did, if she went to university, and she talked about getting a job from a lady in Toronto and how it was harder then for girls to get jobs, and how she’d ended up working doing typewriting, but as soon as she’d finished she said, “Well there’s nothing really interesting or fascinating about me, I’m just a normal person.” “What do you mean?” I said. “You have a story, everything’s an adventure if you make it into one.” It was after this that she said something that pulled tears into my eyes again. She said, “I’m flattered that you would come back. You’re the first person who has come back into my room to just talk.” She explained that her room was usually shown off because she lived with another person but that noone had wanted to come back and just talk to her. It suprised me because she was so friendly I assumed that people actually would stay and talk to her, not just look at her room, and yet it wasn’t so. We walked out together and she showed me where she ate, at the same table, with the same people. At one point earlier she had said, “I’m going to go to lunch now and tell the people that I sit with that you thought I was interesting and a fascinating and they are going to laugh so hard”, to which I replied, “well, anything you tell me is fascinating, it’s your story, and I don’t know any of it, so it’s all interesting to me.” She took me to the menu and we looked at the two options of meals and I pointed out that the strawberry sauce with pound cake looked good, at which she lit up and said , “Yes, I’ll prolly have that.” It was with that she reached out and took my hand and said again how flattered she was, and I asked if I chose to drop by another Wednesday and see her, if that would be ok, to which she was quite agreeable. We said goodbye and I made my way back to the front desk, not without passing a few people I had met earlier such as a man named, Sam whose eye was blurry because raspberry jam had been squirted into it. I told him it was a good story to tell.

I walked out of that place feeling so much love for those people that had briefly touched my life. I was only there for an hr and a half and yet God took me and used me in this place. Here I am, this emotional girl who has let myself become so burdened down with stress and crap that I lost sight of God for awhile. And yet, He gave me people yesterday and last night to pray with me and let me know that He loves me, and then this morning He puts me in a place where I can show that love of His to these beautiful older people. I found this verse that is so encouraging.

Ephesians 3:16-19:
“. . .he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith–that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

I have discovered this year so much that sometimes you can’t truly feel God’s love until He pushes you to express it to other people....It is truly an amazing experience. My friend Julie-Anne has been encouraging me to “Walk by faith, not by sight” and I really feel like that is playing out in my life right now. “That you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (verse 19) is a definite prayer of mine, that weighs on my heart for myself and for those who read this, and most definitely for people such as Mrs. Mulloch.