What Difference Do It Make? by Ron Hall Read Free Book Online Page B

launch Open Table failed to bear fruit. And with no money to pay for marketing and other aspects of their business plan, Ashley and Jesse were forced to shelve the project.
    â€œI was very frustrated that I couldn’t get it going,” Ashley remembers. At the same time, though, a new realization hit her like cold water in the face. “We were pursuing Open Table with a businesslike model. We had a great handle on all the statistics, the economics of the situation, the demographics. We could really rattle off the numbers about homelessness, but we didn’t have heart knowledge about it.”
    It became evident, Ashley says, that she and Jesse and the people they’d rallied to their cause had spent a lot of time talking about doing good in their community, but zero time actually doing anything. “We hadn’t spent a single minute with people in need. Finally, we thought, Let’s just go do it—go serve, and let God work it out. ”
    The first stop was the Union Gospel Mission, where Deborah and I first met Denver. Ashley toured the facility with Paul, a volunteer coordinator, and told him that Bent Tree Bible Fellowship would like to get involved.
    â€œWhere do you have a need?” Ashley asked.
    â€œWell, we really need someone to hold children’s church,” Paul told her. He noted that the Union Gospel Mission focused on faith-based recovery and required adult program members to attend chapel. But it was often difficult for homeless parents to get anything out of chapel because they were too distracted managing their children.
    â€œIf that’s where you have a need, sign us up,” Ashley said.
    â€œHow many volunteers do you think you can get?” Paul asked.
    In that moment, Ashley abandoned her business-plan/ Power Point/action-step instincts and simply jumped. “I have no idea,” she said with a grin. “But I can promise you that my husband, brother-in-law, sister, and parents will come.”
    One Saturday each month, Bent Tree Bible Fellowship began holding children’s church for kids aged five to fourteen. The most appealing part, says Ashley, is that the volunteers brought their own children, not to serve but just to participate—singing, doing crafts, and learning Bible stories side by side with homeless kids. “Our hope is that we’re making our own kids’ worlds just a little bit bigger.”
    By June 2009, Bent Tree had provided so many volunteers that the Union Gospel Mission was able for the first time to open up a nursery one Saturday each month to care for children under age five. “Volunteers just kept walking in and walking in, until the coordinator said, ‘We’ve never had this many people before!’”
    Ashley, planless and happy, just smiled. “Well, here we are!”
    When Ashley was conducting her research to start Open Table, she began to understand the metrics of homelessness—that, yes, there are X number of homeless people and they’re homeless for reasons X, Y , and Z .
    â€œBut I didn’t recognize that these are people with stories and that any of us, all of us, could be there in an instant. The only way to learn that is to go do the work—to meet these people, to know them, to listen to their hearts,” Ashley says.
    Since getting down to the street level on the issue, there is one point Ashley and Jesse have discussed repeatedly: once you’ve connected, once you’ve looked homelessness in the eye, once you know that hundreds of kids in your city go to sleep most nights without a roof over their heads, you have to make a choice either to do something or to consciously turn away.
    â€œYou can’t forget it, so you have to make a choice,” Ashley says. “My sister and I don’t think we’re doing anything close to important or close to enough. But it’s a start.”

8
    Denver
    In 1998, tired of the Park Cities, the Dallas rat race