"We are helping one another find our way home from places as close as five miles and as far away as
twenty years." - Find Your Way Home, by the Women of Magdelene
Mine is Britt. Britt is a social worker in every meaning of the title. She is a teacher. She is an advocate. She is an active driver of important conversations. She is an asker of important questions. She carries words she has heard and read with her and she uses them to further knowledge and understanding that she shares with her students, knowing that they will need it on the days when they are serving others - and especially on the days when serving others is the very last thing they will feel like doing.
Her heart is generous and her head is strong.
She makes me crazy. Just not in the way you think.
Like the few very close friends I have, she knows everything about me, and she's not afraid to show it to me every once in a while. And sometimes, she shows me something that I didn't even know that I needed to see.
We just came off of a nearly week-long vacation to Nashville with our husbands. We went to see some historic sites, enjoy live music, have conversations punctuated by laughter over food and drink, and to get away from home for a little while.
We had a ball. But the morning of the second-to-last day, I started yearning for home. For my kids' hugs and footsteps. For my own bed. For food I didn't have to order off a menu. For my dog. For my worn-out pajama bottoms that I would never wear outside the confines of my own house.
But Britt was expecting three of her students who were joining her for a workshop at Thistle Farms in Nashville. She had asked me weeks ago to come along, and I agreed. Thistle Farms ministers to women who are victims of prostitution, human trafficking and drug abuse. Founded by Rev. Becca Stevens (a reknowned author and women's advocate), I knew it was an advocacy program that Britt thought a lot about. Several weeks ago, it felt like a great idea. Sunday morning, it did not.
I flirted with the idea of talking Pat and Mark into leaving early. It would be easy to take the long drive home in one day with all three of us taking turns driving. Britt could go to the workshop and return with her students.
I'm so glad I didn't.
Thistle Farms is an oasis of joy and healing on a busy and unassuming street in Nashville. The program services close to 50 women, and there are over 100 women on the waiting list. It provides a home and advocacy for women who want to get off of the streets. At its core, Thistle Farms is a sisterhood of survivors who work together to practice healing, gratitude and hospitality. They manufacture bath and body products, using soothing, healing natural oils, and sell them to gain economic independence and to help them grow in vocation.
I had given Britt a hard time about participating in "group time" and that at the first sign of a cirle of trust I was going to manufacture an urgent phone call I needed to take.
I didn't need to. I was enchanted with the women of Thistle Farms from the moment I walked through their doors.
Their stories are powerful. These are women who have been through unspeakable trauma and injustices, and moments in their lives of utter despair and unworthiness. They were candid and generous with their stories, but their joy, hope and gratitude were palpable. They were clear that healing is a practice - one that takes time and work every single day. But together, they are able to find a willingess to banish all judgment and love each other to heal well.
All of their stories described prayers for their desire for drugs and their patterns of selling themselves to get them to stop. But a recurring theme surprised me. It was a longing for home. "I just wanted to go home." "I just wanted to be out of the heat and the rain." "I just wanted to be a mother to my kids." "I just wanted to be somewhere other than under a bridge or in a jail cell." Home was a luxury cruelly out of reach for them, so tightly were they held by the bonds of addiction and systems that had failed them.
During a break, I told Britt with tears in my eyes that I didn't think it was an accident that God put a longing for home in my heart that Sunday morning. My longing helped me identify with their stories in a way that I probably wouldn't have recognized. Home for them was not a house, but a dream of belonging, worthiness, comfort and care. A place where they could take shelter from not only the elements, but a cycle of use, abuse and manipulation.
Tonight, I will light one of my Thistle Farms candles for the many women longing for home. My prayer will be that a light somewhere will lead them there.
And I will give thanks for Britt, who shows me things I need to see.
Please check out Thistle Farms' website at http://thistlefarms.org. You can learn more about Rev. Becca Stevens (she's amazing) and Thistle Farms' full portfolio of social enterprises. It's a beautiful example of social entrepreneurship, and their products are fantastic. Britt and I will be setting up a local event within the next several months so you can learn more and buy products, but in the meantime, Thistle Farms ships, and their products are magnificent. Worth the time.
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