I hope you’re having a beautiful day. ♡
Here’s another light-filled ¤ Gem ¤

“Dear Pavement, The sun used to be the only thing to warm you, and now it’s body heat…a cheek rests on you, a cheek capable of being kissed by a bishop, a cheek once held in a mother’s palm, a cheek that deserves more than the prickly pebbled pillow you are.”

-Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

There are many kinds of homelessness, but one of the most difficult is to be forced from your home to live on the street. I’ve experienced this twice; once as a teen and once as a young mom with a child. In the first case, I was running from a bad home; in the second I was running from a bad man.

Every story is different.

One story I love to tell is about Sister Lucy of Maher. Years before she became a nun when she was a little girl named Lucy, she went to Delhi for the first time with her parents. Her parents were not wealthy but Lucy never wanted for anything as a child. In Delhi, for the first time, she saw people living on the street and suffering terribly. She was horrified. She ran to her parents, crying, and asked “Why is no one helping them?” Her parents tried to explain but the complexities were too difficult for a child to understand. The little girl wanted to help every person she saw, but her parents told her it couldn’t be done.

At that moment, a dream was born in Lucy’s heart. She decided that someday she would do everything in her power to help. She became inspired a few years later by Mother Teresa of Calcutta but discovered she was too young to join their order. At 18, Lucy joined a religious order but soon found out they didn’t do outreach work. It took a few years to be assigned to an order that allowed her to work outside the cloister with people in the community, and years more to get the funds to build her first home for women and children.

Sister Lucy had nothing when she started except her faith, but her faith never wavered. After she built the home, every time she saw a woman or a child sleeping on the street, she helped them up, brought them to her house, fed, bathed, healed them, and told them they could stay. She named her home, “Maher” (“Mother’s Lap” — the safest place on earth). Sister Lucy kept bringing people home until the first house was full. Then she got the funds to build another home, and then another. Every day she found clothing, medicines, and food for the people she sheltered, and the number of those she looked after increased almost daily.

Now there are over 30 homes across India. Maher and Sister Lucy just celebrated 25 years since the first home was opened. My husband and I started helping with a small, monthly donation during the pandemic (and the story of how Sister Lucy helped literally everyone who came to her is incredibly beautiful and inspiring).

When I was a teen runaway, I had a dream like Sister Lucy’s — to build a home for other teen runaways. I found kindness in the runaway shelter with my stepsister. We were only there one night, but after being on the run and on the street, the time with them is vivid. I will never forget it. It was the first and last time I felt safe for a very long time.

Sister Lucy is an inspiration, an Earth Angel. She is kind and loving to everyone. Whenever possible I do admin work for her, but she doesn’t often need it. The children she raised grew up to become beautiful and loving adults. They are helpers — compassionate, kind, and skilled at many professions. They are taking the dream of one little girl (with a heart as big as the world) far into the future.

More on Sister Lucy (from when I featured a week of quotes and her story) is here.  

Here’s here website:

Maher Ashram
View Link