I didn’t know there were people in there, inside this place with a sign that said “Flower Main” on Main Street. It was a flower shop without flowers. Although, I’d soon come to realize the flowers were really the people. Each day, I walked past this shop that looked empty until, one day, the Spirit told me to enter. He said, “I want you to start a Bible study there.”

“Inside a flower shop, Lord?”

But it wasn’t a flower shop. It was a mental health drop-in center.

The doorbell clanged when I entered. A man with a dark mullet and twinkling eyes told me I’d dropped something. I looked around for whatever I’d dropped and he began to laugh. Later I would learn he was seventy, though he looked fifty. He said I’d dropped my shadow.

There was a pool table, a few couches, a couple of TVs, and lots of light shining through the windows at the front of the store. It was the perfect place to grow flowers, I thought. The man with the mullet led me to the back where there was a large rectangular table with plastic chairs full of people who smiled and waved or simply stared at me. They were eating together in this place full of light, and a man named Stan* told me to sit down and eat, too, because it had been his turn to cook that day.

Slowly, I started a Bible study in that flower shop. . .

We began by the TV, all scrunched up on cushions and awkwardly singing as I strummed my guitar, Dan crooning at the top of his lungs and Geoff playing his banjo. Over time, we moved to the couches by the windows where the light streamed in as people walked by. Sometimes, Stephanie was there with her baseball cap and her red-painted nails. She would ask me to play “O Canada” and when we sang “Amazing Grace,” tears streamed down her face.

Occasionally, Tyler was there, too . . . when he wasn’t high. Often, he’d take a break in the middle of singing to go smoke a joint. Then, he’d return to listen as we played hymns and sang.

Tyler knew the gospel. He grew up in a home with a pastor for a father who beat him. Geoff knew it, too. He‘d always make jokes until, one day, I asked if they’d heard the story of Lazarus. When nobody responded, Geoff said quietly, “He didn’t come. He waited until Lazarus died.”

That’s when Geoff told us he could never enter a courthouse because, once, someone beat him so badly that now metal detectors go off because of the metal plates holding his body together.

I fit in here, with the once-addicts trying to get sober and the unseen longing to be seen. I don’t know about you, but I wish all churches were flower shops with windows letting light in and couches we could feel comfortable on.

One time, Tyler pulled me to the side and said he wanted to feel Jesus again . . . like how he used to feel Him at Bible camp when he was a kid. He said he’d been walking along the path at Bible camp and heard Someone laughing behind him. No one had been there, but he’d known it was the Holy Spirit and suddenly he’d begun laughing, too, and had kept on laughing for hours. He wanted that again.

I said, “Let’s pray,” because that’s all I know how to do. We prayed that Jesus would touch him in the same way again. That weekend, Tyler began to read the Gospel of John, and as he read, laughter welled up in him and he laughed for four hours straight. This twenty-year-old man who’d been beaten by his pastor-father, and whose brother had overdosed on a riverbank, sat there laughing with the joy of Jesus.

I keep going back. I can’t stay away from this church. Some days it’s hard. Some days the addictions seem to be winning. But we just keep on singing “Amazing Grace” and holding each other’s hands and praying for the light to take over the dark.

And it always does.

Friend, you’ve got a Jesus who wants to fill you so full that you’ll laugh for hours. You’ve got a Jesus who will put you back together after the world beats you apart. You’ve got a Jesus who loves when you sing off-key and who understands when you’ve had a bad day and who just wants to sit and have a meal with you.

Wherever you are, sister, whatever you’re going through, may the light take over the dark.

*All names have been changed to protect privacy.

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