At Least Bull-Headed Leaders Persevere

It all began with the woman whose lover would be coming after me, she announced, with a knife.

And that was just opening day.

Years ago when I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a number of us in my church observed that there seemed few safe places for homeless women and families to find groceries and clothing—and that we ought to do something about it. My only leadership qualification in this area being a slight deafness to all the explanations of Why This Won’t Work, I became the director. You have no funding, no space, no staff, people insisted in that tone reserved for preschoolers.

We collected cash and canned food and khakis and down coats from our congregation and tunneled out a portion of the church basement that had been used in the 19th century for trash and coal dust disposal—oddly, no one objected to our taking this space. We told and retold each other how Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes. We papered the city with flyers and waited for the grateful masses to gather.

At 10 o'clock on a frigid gray November opening day, we flung open our doors—to precisely no one waiting there.

Then, at last, a woman approached with a baby stroller: bingo—our target group!

We leapt down the steps to welcome the mother and baby whose name, she informed us, was Garfield.

Which I could see for myself.

Because it was, in fact, a stuffed orange cat.

Our first—and only—customer of this grand opening day, this holy moment of mercy and compassion, the culmination of all my fine leadership: Garfield. And his mother. Whose lover, as it turned out, would be stalking me because I'd insisted that our client not take both of our only two infant outfits for her stuffed cat.

Our faithful experiment with loaves and fishes seemed to have rotted right there in the tunneled-out basement.

And yet, over the weeks and the years, God brought snaking lines of clients from all over the world, often with no coats or jobs or food for our long New England winters; and bread, mountains of baked goods from a local bakery; and money, checks flowing in from the strangest of places, often unsought; and towering stacks of food and racks of clothing, often designer labels never worn; and hundreds of volunteers.

Nearly twenty years later, now under different and no doubt more able leadership, the Cambridgeport Clothes Closet/Food Pantry lives on. It developed one characteristic under my early leadership that I still see in its operation: perseverance. Weak-willed and unkind people call it bull-headedness, but that is true too. Despite our pathetic beginnings and shortcomings and stumbles, we stubbornly clung to the hope that God could somehow work some kind of low-level, B-movie wonders with the meager offerings that showed up.

The loaves and croissants and fishes and fruit and mittens and meat and money kept coming, despite all my entrepreneurial clumsiness. For here was God's abundance like the deep end of the ocean, where no one's touched bottom yet—God's power working in us to accomplish far more than we would ask or imagine.