20 years of reflections from a halfway house porch...

In the late summer of 1993, a desperate, broken 41 year old man stood on the front walk of a small North Carolina halfway house and paused uncertainly.

Touching his arm gently, the pretty young Vocational Rehabilitation counselor who had brought him there from the state supported treatment center, encouraged him. "Go on in." she said. "They are expecting you."

Too scared to say it out loud, he thought to himself "I doubt it. There's not a soul in this world who'd be glad to see me coming up the front walk" He held the cardboard Pepperidge Farm Danish box a little tighter. It held the used clothing they'd been kind enough to give him from the clothes closet at the center.  On his feet were a stiff pair of new tennis shoes.  A fellow patient had gotten a home visit pass from the facility and bought them for him at the Dollar General out of pity, because he had arrived at the treatment center barefoot. With no socks, the stiff shoes had rubbed his heels a little raw.

"Come on," Gail said, and  led him up the scuffed peeling paint concrete steps to the porch.

She rang the doorbell and he looked around the porch. It was an old, two story wood framed house that had definitely seen better days. He noticed that through the modern vinyl siding you could still see some reminders of the fancy moldings and casings that testified to the house's original glory days. Just the kind of old house he had always had a dream of owning and fixing up.  And that was just one of  his many broken dreams, most of which had been lost in the nightmare of his out of control drinking and the crack addiction and the nightmare spiraling all the way down to living on the street homeless, eating out of dumpsters, and doing the things necessary to get through those last terrible days. Things he really didn't want to remember.

Suddenly he felt panicked. No, it really couldn't have come down to this for him, could it? Not him, not with all the potential of his younger days, and all those hopes and plans, all that talent and ability and intelligence, come to naught, and the mark that he was sure he was going to make on the world, the dreamed of successes, and the golden nugget vision of what his life would be that  he'd always carried inside like a secret, hidden jewel -- all that come to this? Standing like a beggar at the door of this run down looking halfway house hoping for charity? He felt like he was going to throw up.

The only thing that kept him standing there waiting for someone to answer the door was Gail's quick sympathetic glance. "It's okay, Kirk. They can help you here. Trust me.' Since he couldn't trust himself any more, he felt the only thing he could do was to trust her.

A tall, stern looking man opened the front door. "Welcome,' he said, "to Christian Fellowship Home."