A surprising Sunday afternoon

Well I only lasted two days, but yesterday afternoon I had a surprisingly pleasant and encouraging afternoon, so I thought I’d blog about it. After teaching Sunday School in church yesterday morning I decided to head up to Katoomba Easter Convention to catch up with some friends who had come from afar to be there. They knew I was planning to do this and had texted me Saturday afternoon, so after church Sunday morning I tried to phone them, realised they’d still be in the talks up there and weren’t answering, so decided to start driving anyway, since it’s about two hours away. I stopped off around Wentworth Falls to phone ahead and get the address of where they were staying. Still no answer. So I drove on to Leura and parked near the Mall there. Called again. Their phone was still switched off. By this stage I’d left a few messages, and figured that when they turned the phone on they’d get them.

So, I wandered up and down Leura Mall doing the craft-shop thing, waiting for a phone call. After about half an hour of this I was beginning to get miserable with the realisation that I had driven all this way and had been really looking forward to catching up and having some company (I had been home alone all long weekend so far – had fun catching up with people Thursday and Friday night but Saturday was just me and my projects and I was looking forward to a conversation with old friends) and that I hadn’t even bought a book to read or a notebook to write in and wasn’t really decked out for a bushwalk if I decided to just amuse myself up there. So, I had walked up and down Leura Mall and was back where I started wondering what to do when I saw Penny, a lady who had attended my previous church with her husband for a time, walk by. I said hello, but she seemed to look straight through me (and I had been told I was unrecognisable in church that morning because I straightened my hair) and walked on and I thought that was it. But then she stopped and came back and said hello, asked me what I was doing, so I told her my sorry tale. She said, well come back to my place for a cup of tea, it’s just down the road. So I did.

To tell you a little about Penny: she became a Christian in 2000 as a alcoholic (I’m telling you all these details because they are readily available on the website I’ll point you to soon) and battled alcoholism for the next three years. But Penny is not what you might be imagining in terms of an alcoholic. She and her husband are what anybody would call "well-to-do", and could hobnob with the biggest snoots in this city. Only 3% of alcoholics live in parks. The rest of them include people like private school Mums and white-collar professionals.

Since becoming a Christian Penny has started a ministry to people recovering from addictions of all sorts, which Phillip Jensen actually helped her get started (details below). So, on the short walk to her house she filled me in on the fact that staying with her was a lady I’d meet shortly, who was 21 days clean of addiction to a “whole gambit of things”, had five kids with the Department of Community Services to four different fathers, was waiting for a house from public housing and so staying with Penny and her family till then. So I met S when I got to the house. The three of us then took our tea and hot-cross buns into the beautiful blue-mountains-federation-house sunroom and got talking.

Penny is pretty open about talking about her own junk, and I guess her ministry allows other people to feel free to share their junk too, so we soon got engrossed in a really good conversation. S doesn’t say much but sat there listening. (Let me just say at this point that I don’t have an addiction, never have had one and don’t even think I have much junk compared to some. But most people have their quota of stuff, and I reckon I could pretty easily be an addict of some sort. Those who work in addictions or mental health reckon we all walk a fine line between "normal" and something.)

Then S and I followed Penny outside and I pottered around behind her with the watering can while she planted petunias, then I shot a few hoops in the basketball net set up in the backyard underneath the beautiful big old trees while she did some watering. And all the while we kept talking and I kept laughing. Penny makes me laugh because she’s one of the most tell-it-like-it-is people you’ll ever meet, and comes out with lines like “relationships are hard, that’s why they make movies out of them when they work” etc. And I was really blessed to catch this quiet moment with Penny. She’d had hordes of people through the house all weekend and literally dozens of teenagers about the place (she has three herself) but this afternoon she was free. Unfortunately her husband was up at the hospital with his elderly father who’d come to visit and had taken a fall that morning. He called to tell Penny that his Dad had a fractured hip, and Penny got off the phone and said: “What a drama. I don’t do drama”. This also made me burst out laughing (S too), because few people invite so much drama into their lives. (I had a quick whisper to Penny in the kitchen regarding S, when I think she had gone out to smoke, and Penny’s response was “God help me!”, but she says that with sincerity because she lives each day with a “God help me!".)

I still hadn’t heard from my friends so I stayed on for delicious homemade minestrone soup and homemade vanilla bean ice-cream for dinner.

After dinner Penny quickly showed me through her slide show presentation for her ministry. Then she asked me if I knew PowerPoint and could I snazz it up for her. The silly thing is that I am a long way from a PowerPoint guru. When I did my Honours dissertation at University I did a slide show with these things we had back then called photographic slides, which you put in this ancient mechanism called a carousel. And I believe I used overhead transparencies. But I now know more about PowerPoint than Penny does and as she says “all the people who are really good at this stuff are too busy doing everybody else’s stuff”. So I might have a go.

I am pretty wowed by what Penny does. Among other things she drives from her home in the Eastern Suburbs for a three hour round trip to Campbelltown to minister to recovering addicts out there. It’s all very easy for me to sit in my loungeroom and write a blog post like I half care about these people, but how many of us really want to go to Campbelltown to hang with addicts and take a homeless one home for Easter? Anyway, I could go on and on. But if you’d like to know more then visit the Overcomers Outreach website (they call themselves OO and follow an AA-type program, because AA works), where you can actually watch a video interview between Phillip Jensen and Penny and find out more information. If you know someone with an addiction problem, Penny is the person to talk to.

After my quick look through some of Penny’s material, the three of us headed up to the evening session of the Easter Convention. The especially glorious news in all of this is that S has given her life to Christ. Jonny Gibson was preaching through Ephesians and the evening’s talk was on Marriage. I have just heard talks on Marriage for three weeks at my church, and I was curious to hear Jonny (because I first knew of him as a college student) but didn't know I was in for another talk on marriage. But as Jonny said in his opening, the word of God is never insensitive or ill-timed and in God’s providence you are here tonight to hear this, and went on to explain why marriage needs to be understood firstly theologically (ie in relation to God), rather than experientially, and fitted marriage into God’s big picture of the reunification of the cosmos and gave a jolly good talk.

So, I never did hear from my friends (though heard from them this morning and they have a good explanation and headed home early), but I don’t believe it was pure coincidence that I bumped into Penny and had such a wonderful afternoon. I’ve now got myself a little pile of information on working with people recovering from addiction, a little job or two, am back in contact with someone I hadn’t even seen for months, and who knows where it might end up.