Sanctuary

God’s connecting points, by Greg Paul

D

oug had heard that the beautiful park that serves as the front yard of a large downtown church had lately become a favourite late night hangout for drug dealers. So, naturally, that’s where we end up at about one in the morning after a couple of hours spent poking into some of the city’s other dark corners. Sitting at a steel picnic table, right in the middle of the park, that looks like it had been air-lifted straight out of downtown Baghdad. Sodium lights lining the centre walkway cut a murky orange swath through that peculiar permanent dusk of inner-city parks at night: islands and archipelagos of shadow with the pale wash of streetlights lapping weakly against their shores.

As we sit there talking quietly, the dealers swim in restless circles through the dark pools beneath the trees. Baring their teeth at each other, casting sideways glances at us from expressionless basalt eyes. Calling softly to the odd passerby who hesitates on the perimeter sidewalk peering uncertainly into the gloom.

And then the advent of an absurd vision: a petite hooded figure towing a large pink suitcase on wheels. She leaves the sidewalk at one corner of the park and drags her luggage diagonally across the grass through the deeper shadows. Dealers one after another peel away from her, evolutions of some strange minuet, their attentions drawn miraculously elsewhere for the few seconds it takes her to traverse each successive bit of turf. She makes straight for our bombed-out picnic table, parks her suitcase, pushes back her hood and wonders aloud if we can help her.

“… the advent of an absurd vision: a petite hooded figure towing a large pink suitcase on wheels”

She arrived in Toronto at eight after hitchhiking from Sudbury, and has been walking ever since. She can’t believe how big this place is, how many people and cars and buildings there are. She needs a place to stay – somebody sent her to a hostel of some kind, but they wanted twenty-seven dollars; she only has forty, and needs twenty of that for dope and the rest for fluid for her contacts and stuff like that.

Do we know where she could get some dope? She really needs to get high, she’s so stressed out. A tiny little blond thing in stretchy pale pink pants and a brown hooded sweatshirt. Says she’s seventeen, looks fourteen. Do we know where she could stay for the night? And have we seen her sister? (She shows us a photograph.) We tell her that, if she really wants dope, she’s probably in the right place. No, we don’t have any, but practically everybody else in the park does. She contemplates the dealers. Would we go with her to make a buy? Well, we’re church outreach workers, so no, that would be awkward…

Having made a few calls, and finding that a local youth hostel would take her for the night, we tell her she’ll have to decide between getting high and having a place to sleep – the shelter won’t take her in stoned, and would expel her if they found she was carrying dope. We offer to walk her the half dozen blocks to the shelter, and she accepts. As we leave the park with the girl between us, the dealers crab-walk up to us muttering “You okay? You okay?” from the corners of their mouths. Dealer speak for “What can I sell you this evening?”

“…a girl arriving in Toronto in her situation lasts about two weeks before getting drawn in to some form of prostitution”

After a couple of blocks – she insists on hauling her own suitcase – she remarks brightly on how warm it is here, stops, and pulls off the sweatshirt. A tight tank top underneath, a lovely little figure, and I find myself thanking God that she left the hoody on until now, and that she hitchhiked into town instead of arriving at the bus depot where the recruiters hunt for fresh meat. “I need to give you some advice,” I tell her as we start off again. I warn her against accepting an invitation to stay at some polite young stranger’s place ‘until she gets herself settled’, and explain that, on average, a girl arriving in Toronto in her situation lasts about two weeks before getting drawn in to some form of prostitution. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye and mentions quietly that she already turned one guy down.

A little later, we tell her that, if it’s safe for her to do so, the very best thing she could do would be to turn around and go home. Again the dip of the head, the careful look from shuttered eyes. She had been living with a boyfriend; he threw her out, and no, going home isn’t really an option. She really wants to find her sister, who is on the methadone program, and ran from her boyfriend with her baby a couple of weeks ago…

When last we see her, it is through mullioned glass doors as she is pulling that pink suitcase down the long night-empty corridor of the youth hostel.

Outside on the sidewalk, Doug and I let go the long breaths it feels like we have been holding for an hour. And we pray. I am not fooling myself: I know that we have likely only helped stave off deeper destruction in her life for one night. But I wonder about one impossibly naïve, vulnerable little girl navigating blindly for five hours through some of the sharpest shoals in this city, and coming to rest in front of our picnic table.

I wonder about what further miracles of grace and protection, most of them utterly unnoticed, might attend her course. And I wonder the same about myself: what unmarked dangers have I so narrowly missed? It’s all too easy to mark the times and places that I’ve crashed. But what incognito angels and guardians have piloted me past hazards only dimly recognized, if that? And I give thanks, and pray.

“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, you are there…” Psalm 139: 7, 8

Writer: A former carpenter, Greg Paul has been involved in inner-city ministry for over twenty-five years. He is the founder of Sanctuary
Ministries of downtown Toronto, Canada and the current director. Partnering with other organizations, Greg has developed the vision of building a community in which he and his family, as well as other staff and volunteers, live, work and share the experiences of the people they help. Greg is the lead vocalist and keyboardist for Red Rain, the band that planted the seed for Sanctuary in the mid-1980s. Shaw Books published Greg’s first book, “God in the Alley: Being and Seeing Jesus in a Broken World” in the fall of 2004. He’s currently working on a novel.

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