Hello! I’m Laurel, the Mercy Volunteer at Lydia’s House in Cincinnati this year. I absolutely love what I’m doing, and I keep trying to explain it to other people, but I’m not very good at describing the work I’m doing or why it means so much to me. When I try to explain it, here’s what I end up saying:

• I’m working at a shelter for moms with young kids
• I spend a lot of time in staff meetings or in meetings with Lydia’s House guests
• I fill out a lot of the same applications with different women
• I drive families around to fill out housing applications or I take their applications in on my own
• I email and mail many more housing applications into a void (except for one lady who replies)
• I clean up the playroom and the kitchen and the dining room and the bedrooms that families have moved out of
• I help teach the Wednesday night Catholic Montessori program
• I listen to a lot of hold music while I try to figure out families’ food stamps or childcare vouchers or Medicaid
• I set up for dinners, try to help kids stay in a chair and eat some of their dinner, and clean up afterward

But here’s what I’m trying to say:

When families first move in, I welcome them and orient them and do my very best to show that Lydia’s House is delighted to have them and that they will be loved as people here as well as helped on the way to stability. I show the kids the snacks that are right at their height and hold their hand while they try the climbing toys for the first time.

Then I meet with the moms for the first time and we get started on applying for birth certificates, social security cards, and state IDs, which are needed for almost everything. I get to fill the space between everything that has to be navigated to get these documents—the confusing bureaucratic requirements and lack of instructions—and what a mom actually has the time and mental energy to do for her family. I’m right there with the moms and I see the emotional shift that happens with getting a basis for stability.

My supervisors at Lydia’s House like to talk about “reducing the friction on poor families.” That’s a lot of what I do. I can call around for dentists that will take their Medicaid so that they can put their energy into their family and work. I know that one housing application won’t be accepted if it’s printed on both sides of the paper, and that another one will only be accepted if it’s filled out in blue pen instead of black, and I can be the one who deals with those requirements.

Our (delightfully liturgical) staff meetings and our daily noon prayer fill me up spiritually. They give me both the fellowship and the spiritual re-filling that make me supported and steady enough to invest myself much more fully into the lives of these families. In my mind, the fellow staff and the structure of Lydia’s House act like a tether or a climbing harness, and I see myself adventuring further into relationships than I would be able to without them.

Sometimes I spend hours in a week talking to the same family as I drive them around, hearing about their lives and getting to know them. I get to hear stories of what preschool was like today, and what made hope come back into someone’s life one time, and childhood pets, and someone’s dream of starting their own shelter someday. Somehow, real connections keep happening! Yesterday as I said goodnight and walked out of the shelter, two kids spontaneously told me “I love you!” On a drive to a housing appointment, one of the guests asked me who Mary was and I got to be the person who was with her when it sank in that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was also an unmarried young mother! Another mom asked me if I thought her kids would be welcome in churches and if I could come with them to try. One time, I even got asked point blank, “You believe in Jesus, right? Why?”

And finally, I get to witness people being loved well. I see the families who used to stay at Lydia’s House come back for the Wednesday night program and make friends with the current guests, and how exciting it can be to meet someone who was once in your situation and now has a stable job and an apartment. I get to see kids grow more comfortable with community dinners and playing with other kids and asking for what they need, and I’m there to see people move gradually into sunnier, calmer, more hopeful ways of living.

So that’s what I do as a Mercy Volunteer at Lydia’s House! I still don’t feel very qualified and I still feel like I’m bumbling around a little bit, but it is such a treat to really get to know and love people in a new city and be a part of the vibrant and odd Lydia’s House community.

Laurel Stoltzfus: Cincinnati, Ohio