by Lea Sims
She smiled wanly at them and said, “It’s obvious my aunt found a home here. I’m very grateful for that.” Signaling her desire to end that part of the conversation, she turned to Pastor Jason and Claire. “Can we discuss the service now and what you’ll need from me?” Pastor Jason nodded and walked Delaney up onto the platform to talk through the service flow. Claire stayed down on the floor next to Drew and watched Delaney closely.
“She’s a guarded one,” Drew whispered beside her, also watching Delaney’s graceful stride across the stage. “And gorgeous.”
Claire turned and tilted her head to look over her glasses pointedly at Drew, eyebrows raised and eyes twinkling with interest. Drew put up a hand to ward her off. He knew that look.
“Oh no, Ms. Claire, don’t even think about it,” Drew said smiling but serious. “I’m not looking for gorgeous. You know that. I’m holding out for beautiful.” Claire knew he was talking about inner beauty, and she smiled at what a precious response that was. Drew was a man after God’s heart, that’s for sure. Everyone in the church knew he was the catch of the century, but they also knew he had no desire to date until God pointed to the right girl.
“People can be both, you know,” Claire said without looking at him but wisely said no more about it.
She thought about it plenty, though.
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Funerals and memorial services were at the bottom of Delaney’s list of bearable activities, not that anyone really enjoyed a funeral. Still, she had grown up in the conservative but hospitable bosom of the Deep South, where funerals were an event. The degree to which her aunt and the other women of Shady Oaks Community Church would gather and cluck over funeral details and reception menus made it seem like something they almost looked forward to. Her Aunt Beth always had at least three Sara Lee pound cakes in the freezer at any given time to take to grieving families or memorial service gatherings. Delaney had attended many funeral services with her aunt, always with said pound cake in hand—usually thawed and transferred from the container to a foil-wrapped cake plate with “Lowell” written on a piece of masking tape on the underside. Delaney had secretly always wanted to cross it out and write “Sara Lee” on the masking tape instead.
But there wasn’t anything to enjoy about a funeral, in her opinion. After her parents died, she had tried to avoid them. Once death has bitten you deep, those wounds open anew every time you experience the grief of others. Sympathy enables you to support another in their grief. Empathy forces you to experience it with them. And grief was a meal she never cared to eat again. Yet, here she was on her way to another funeral, of the person who had arguably the greatest impact on her, and she was side-stepping grief as she always had, staying a few steps ahead of it at every turn, determined not to be caught by it or confined in a small space with it.
As she sat on the bed in her hotel room Wednesday morning mustering the courage to drive down to the funeral, she thought about what her aunt would say to her right now. There was a deep internal conflict going on within her that she was trying very hard to put a label on and file away. Almost as soon as she had arrived in Savannah, the emotional detachment with which she lived her adult life had suddenly become a challenge to sustain. She had left the church on Monday night feeling utterly disoriented and isolated. Yesterday, she had met Claire at the funeral home to discuss funeral service and burial details, but she had declined an invitation from Claire to go to lunch, making the excuse that she had work to do. She had also lied to her and told her she was meeting SCAD friends for dinner last night, but all she had done was take Rogue for a walk around downtown, then picked up Chinese take-out and brought it back to the hotel. She wasn’t sure why she was avoiding Claire or why she had felt so thrown off by the people at the church.
On the one hand, she felt oddly irritated to have discovered a circle of connection between her aunt and the people of Refresh Station Church—a circle Delaney was not a part of. But why did it matter to her? She had stepped out of her aunt’s circle years ago and told herself that both she and her aunt were better off that way. On the other hand, she was slightly in awe of how wonderful these people were and how much they cared for her aunt. They weren’t the closed-minded gossips and hypocrites she had so long associated with “church,” though both her aunt and Claire were neither of those things, she had to admit. That only made her feel guilty and ashamed for the second time in three days. Like a ping pong ball being lightly tapped back and forth across an invisible net, she kept feeling little tugs of guilt, then irritation, then wonder, then sorrow, then frustration. The mental energy she was exerting to suppress it all was draining her.
Her aunt would tell her that she was deceiving herself. “You can lie to your family and you can lie to your friends, but you can never lie to yourself, Laney,” Aunt Beth would say. The older she got, the more Delaney realized that certain things were ingrained in your memory whether you wanted them to be there or not. Her aunt considered all of life a lesson, and no matter how much she might like to distance herself from those lessons, Delaney realized that they were stuck to her conscience like super glue. And it was her conscience that was bothering her. More than she’d like to admit, actually.
Why am I not upset and crying right now? The thought skittered across her brain at random times but was beginning to annoy her with its persistence. She tried to apply some analysis to her situation, concluding weakly that the distance between her and her aunt was the reason she didn’t feel more distraught about her passing. Or maybe she just wasn’t capable of producing the same kind of emotional response everyone else did. But her conscience rebelled within her. It was wrong not to grieve the passing of a loved one, wrong not to feel the ache of their loss. What is wrong with me? Did I not love my aunt at all? Maybe love was also an emotion she was incapable of truly feeling. And if you can’t feel love, you can’t feel loss.
But then she looked down at Rogue, who was lying next to her on the hotel bed, and her heart skipped a little beat. Oh, she could love deeply. This she knew for sure, sliding down next to Rogue and laying her cheek against her dog’s silky ears. She loved this dog with all the love she couldn’t bring herself to share with people.
“C’mon, baby girl,” she crooned to the object of her devotion. “Wanna go for a walk?” At the word “walk,” Rogue bounded from her dead-log position to the floor in a single move, grabbing the leash off the credenza with her mouth, and turning back to Delaney with her tail wagging in unbridled glee.
After taking Rogue for a long walk and game of fetch in Emmet Park, Delaney showered, dressed and headed over to the church. The memorial service was scheduled for four o’clock in the afternoon because of an outreach event that was going on at the church during lunch time, but Delaney wanted to get there early so that she could help with any of the set-up and be prepared to greet the guests who would be arriving.
At her aunt’s instructions, which Delaney had learned were outlined in a will Elizabeth had prepared through her attorney a few years before, there had been no funeral home viewing and there would not be an open casket service. That meant Delaney had no idea who would be showing up at the memorial today, which made her feel uneasy and out of place for the umpteenth time since she got there.
When she walked up the stone walkway to Refresh at noon, she was amazed to see that the “outreach” event was actually a street-side cafe. The bay doors of the old station were open, and some of the farmhouse tables she’d seen inside Monday night had been pulled out to the driveway, while others remained inside. A large chalkboard easel was positioned where the driveway met the sidewalk. It read:
Refresh Station
Need a refill?
Lunch (and prayer) is on us!
Today serving: Fish and chips
&n
bsp; We keep serving until the food runs out.
Donations welcome.
Almost all the tables were full of people eating and talking. Some of the people looked like college students, others area businessmen. Around one particularly animated table, a group of elderly men and women were playing Yahtzee. They had likely arrived by way of the van Delaney had seen in the parking lot. A logo on the side of the van had read “Brookfield Assisted Living.” Interspersed among the patrons were also a couple of people that Delaney suspected were homeless, and at two of the tables, someone wearing a Refresh Station T-shirt was praying with or over an occupant at the table.
As she made her way around the tables and into the bay, she could see that there was a line of people down one inside wall. They were waiting to pick up their food from the volunteers at the kitchen pass-thru windows. On the opposite wall where the wooden platform had been built, she saw Drew, realizing suddenly that he was playing his guitar and singing along with another guy who was sitting on and playing a box drum. She smiled as she realized Drew was singing James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend.” She watched him for a moment, impressed again by both the mellow tone of his voice and his skill on the guitar. Some people were talented, but you didn’t have to hear Drew for longer than a minute to recognize that he was truly gifted.
As if sensing her gaze, Drew looked up and caught her staring. Not one to retreat, she simply smiled and gave him a thumbs-up. He nodded and smiled back. When he reached the end of the song, he said something to the guy on the drum, put his guitar back on the stand, and came over to where Delaney was standing.
“Hey there,” he said with a quiet smile. “How are you holding up?”
His eyes really were something special. Not only were they unusually beautiful, they were also full of kindness. “I’m doing okay,” she replied. “I think I’m still trying to process what’s happened, to be honest.”
“That’s understandable,” he said. “Grief is definitely a process.”
“It is,” she said but offered nothing more on that topic. Instead she looked back around the room and said, “Drew, this is pretty amazing. How often does the church do this?”
“Monday through Thursday,” he said.
“Wait…what?” She couldn’t hide the shock on her face. She assumed this kind of thing would be offered maybe once a month. “You open this place and provide these meals…almost every day?” He nodded. “How? I mean, how can you pull this off four days a week and not have people take advantage of it?”
“Well,” he said, breaking into a cheeky grin. “We want people to take advantage of it. That’s kind of the point, actually.”
She laughed. “You know what I mean. When word gets out that you’re giving away free lunches every day, people will be lined up down the block and around the corner.” She returned his grin with one of her own.
“We’ve been doing this for nearly three years,” he said, chuckling as her eyebrows flew up again in astonishment. “We’ve had a surprisingly small number of people abuse the offering.” He pointed to an open table, inviting her to sit down.
For the next thirty minutes, she listened in amazed silence as Drew told her how the lunch outreach had started. One of the biggest reasons Pastor Jason and his wife Lisa had chosen the fire station property for the church was because it would enable them to be downtown and able to truly minister to a wide range of people in the area, including SCAD and Savannah State students and the homeless who were scattered around the downtown parks and mission centers. Not long after they had renovated and moved into the building, they held a block-party open house, offering food and live music. They were surprised by the turnout but more so by the environment the event had created for community connection and great conversations about God and faith.
By the following month, they had rallied to offer a lunch outreach on Wednesdays only, open to anyone who wanted to come. Eventually, through support and donations, they were able to offer it four days a week. Drew explained that they had decided early on not to restrict the outreach to a certain group of people or require any kind of payment or registration. They also wouldn’t advertise or market the offering. They would simply open the bay doors, prepare meals, put out tables, and leave it to the Holy Spirit to bring the right people each day who needed to be fed.
“Fed and refreshed,” Drew emphasized. “That’s the core mission of our church. When you look at the ministry of Christ, you see such a common thread of him meeting people’s physical and emotional needs before he addressed their spiritual needs. Who can listen to a message about the gospel when their stomach is growling from hunger or their mind and heart are broken from abuse? Besides, we’ve discovered that if we focus on being the gospel instead of just preaching it, we see more lives changed.”
Delaney thought about that for a moment. She tried to picture Shady Oaks offering this kind of daily outreach. Not only would they have had very limited resources to make it happen, she also suspected that there would have been a whole lot more requirements and restrictions imposed on who could participate and who couldn’t. She remembered a clothing drive they had done one year to support the battered women’s shelter. Her Aunt Beth had come home complaining about the bickering that had broken out among the members of the serving team over how many articles of clothing each woman at the shelter should get and whether they should be able to pick their own or simply be given the clothes in predetermined bags. Delaney couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if they had simply shown up with a truckload of clothing and opened the cab door.
“What do you do with people who show up all the time? Surely you have some down-on-their-luck types who see this as their free lunch every day,” Delaney persisted, still not quite buying into the idealism she was hearing. There had to be a down side.
“Well, we have a few of those for sure,” Drew said nodding. “Interestingly, it’s rarely the homeless. They are used to making their way around the city for meal offerings. We’ve had more of an issue with college students, who have big appetites and tight semester budgets. But when we’re tempted to say something to them or start putting some restrictions around them, we remember our mission. We sit down at the table with them and ask them about school, their families, and their future plans. We get to know them, because…well…that’s kind of the whole point, right? We show them that we’re not just here to fill their stomachs. We are here to get to know them and draw them to the heart of God. And relationships are built over many meals and many conversations, so we’re committed to keep feeding them. What we discover when we get to know them is that there are a lot of ways we can help them and show them that God cares about where they are right now in this season of their lives. We’ve arranged everything from tutors for students to haircuts for the homeless depending on the needs we hear expressed at these tables. And you know what ends up happening? So many of them find their way here for Sunday services and become part of our church. It’s crazy what God has done through this outreach.”
“Yeah, but who pays for it?”
“Funding this is part of our operating budget, which comes out of the tithes and offerings we bring in from our church members, but we also take donations. We have a hard-and-fast rule not to walk up to anyone and ask for donations. We don’t want people to be put on the spot or made to feel guilty if they can’t donate. We have two signs to let people know that this is an outreach that can always benefit from donations and support. One is on the chalkboard you saw when you came in. The other one is over there.” Drew pointed to a small white sign on the wall between the pass-thru windows that read: If you can afford this meal, consider donating to this outreach to support those who cannot. There was a box below it for people to drop cash, checks and loose change into.
“Sometimes people just need a little nudge to remember to be generous,” Drew continued. “Most of the business people who come here usually pay something for
their meals. They drop a few bucks in every time they come. A few of them have been incredibly generous, giving us checks or donating things we can use for the outreach. There is a bakery not far from here that donates all the buns we use. But honestly, the outreach markets itself. Most of our donations have come from people who have been either impressed or blessed by this outreach.”
“Don’t you worry about this becoming a free-for-all?” Delaney asked, still struggling a bit with the idea.
“Delaney,” Drew said, suddenly serious and looking unwaveringly into her eyes, “What we offer here is free for all. God’s love is free for all. He doesn’t make us clean up, dress nicely, and buy a ticket in order to have access to him. He also doesn’t put restrictions on how often we can come to him in need. As much as we can, we try to reflect that same love through this church. Obviously, we don’t have an endless supply of fish and chips or chicken burritos—that’s what we’re serving tomorrow, by the way—but what we do have, we give freely. We keep serving food to whoever shows up here until there is none left. Then we close the bay doors, clean up, and come back the next day to do it again.”
He saw something in her beautiful blue eyes shutter closed when he mentioned God’s love being free for everyone. The insight he had shared with Claire about how guarded Delaney seemed was proving to be accurate. Even though she was as beautifully put together on the outside as a woman could possibly be, there were some serious walls there. Drew knew that what lay on the other side of big walls was almost always big pain.
“Can I ask you something?” he said gently.
“I guess so,” Delaney said uncertainly, laughing awkwardly. “Can’t promise I’ll answer, but go ahead.”