Eulogy for the Ones Who Never Had a Chance

My friend Matt passed away a short while ago. Earlier on the day he died, he called the only man who ever really acted as a father toward him, and said that he was on his way from one Northern Ontario city to another in order to get into rehab. Instead, he stopped along the
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How To Receive Gifts

When, early in 1992, I began full time work at what would soon become Sanctuary, I had already been involved in some kind of consistent outreach work in the inner city for close to eighteen years. Despite such lengthy previous experience of hanging out on the street with hustlers of one sort or another, or
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Look Up

A couple of years ago, a visitor sought me out in the midst of a busy Wednesday drop-in. She was in her mid-thirties, nicely dressed, pretty and so bursting with obvious health that I didn’t recognize her until she jogged my memory. Perhaps a decade before, she had spent a year or two hanging out
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Kingdom Community

As the song says, “You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.” On the morning of the day I left Toronto for more than three weeks of consulting and speaking in Australia and New Zealand, my friend Cliff died. He had been desperately ill for months, so it was no surprise. Cliff had been
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