Rescue and Advent

A Taxi Full of Grace

According to family lore, my grandmother was once voted the meanest woman in Mishawaka, Indiana. She was a tiny woman with an equally small measure of patience for her three children. One year when my Dad was 5 years old, my grandmother went out to buy the family Christmas gifts and somehow she lost the money and returned empty handed. No one knows if she accidentally dropped the money somewhere or if it was stolen but the upshot was that it was Christmas and there were going to be no gifts or tree that year. My grandfather had just joined Alcoholics Anonymous after a long career of binge drinking (he gave my aunt the wrong name at her birth because he was too drunk to remember the agreed upon name – he was that guy). This was a family that was rough around the edges, to say the least. Somehow my grandpa’s AA group heard about their predicament and hired a taxi, filled it with enough groceries for a week, gifts, and a tree, and sent the taxi to their home. They sent it all in a taxi so that my grandparents would not know exactly who had sent the gifts and would have to accept them. Thus a taxi hired by recovering alcoholics, filled with gifts, arrived unexpectedly at their front door on Christmas Eve. And the meanest woman in Mishawaka and her family celebrated the birth of Jesus despite having done very few works that could be called “good” in the preceding year.

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Music to Celebrate Christmas

Advent 2020

It’s Advent Season and our celebrations look a little different this year but we are finding new, online ways to honor the birth of Jesus. Several of our in-house musicians from Grrr Records, including Glenn Kaiser and members of The Crossing, have put together some music videos with their takes on Christmas songs old and new.

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Christmas in the Time of Covid at Jesus People

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1:5

My favorite time during the holiday season comes in the few days after Christmas. The gifts are unwrapped and put away, there are leftover cookies everywhere you turn, and people are still in the holiday mood but have already finished (or not finished) the long list of traditions and gatherings that can be both a blessing and a bane. Things get quiet. People sleep in. A calm descends and everyone in our house shuffles around in new slippers, clutching cups of coffee and chatting in the hallways, or visiting in each other’s rooms. This has always been part of my ultimate idea of Heaven – hanging out with loved ones, grateful for each other, and having enough time to just be with each other, without any planned activities or expectations. The Christmas decorations are still up so everything looks beautiful but the chaos is somewhere in the far off distance.

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Christmas With Those Who Don’t Have a Home

The weeks leading up to Christmas here at Cornerstone are a glimpse into what I imagine Santa’s workshop would be like. A constant bustle of deliveries, organizing toys, gift wrapping and agonizing over what to give teenagers. Between hanging holiday decorations and consuming copious amounts of caffeine, we strive to create a sense of normalcy and celebration for our shelter guests. After all, just because they are experiencing homelessness doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to have an amazing Christmas.

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