Kindred Spirits

Ann | Mentee

After 25 years working in social services, Ann was exhausted. Raising two sons by herself had taken its toll. After they moved out, she quit her job and found she was alone with a person she didn’t like - herself. “I just stopped ... believing that there was anything left for me to do. I was old and I was a burden.” Unhealed wounds from the past cropped up, dragging her self-worth even lower. She withdrew from friends and family, and her isolation fed a spiral into darkness.

“I was ready to die. I was more ready to die than I was to live.”

Shirley | Mentor

No mom should have to bury her son. When Shirley’s 34-year-old son died within three months of his cancer diagnosis, her world turned upside down. “I had lost the will to live. I didn’t really care. I just didn’t care.”

Things that mattered to her before lost their significance. “I had always worked hard, and I wanted everything in a neat little package, so much in the bank, all this.” In a flash, all of that became meaningless. “I wanted to make my life count.”

Brokenness led Ann to a point of surrender. When her son kicked her out of his house for smoking pot, she knew she had hit rock bottom. “I said to God, ‘I will do anything to see your face. I will give up everything,’ and that’s what I ended up doing.” Ann was admitted into UGM Women’s Recovery, where she found the source of truth and hope. “I had probably been at least 12 different religions ... I’ve been searching for a long time.” Studying the Bible at Anna Ogden Hall showed her who Jesus is and what He had done for her through his death on the cross. On Good Friday, she surrendered everything to Him. “Jesus is my Lord, not just my Savior, but the way that I want to live my life.”

Shirley sold her five-bedroom house and moved into a one- bedroom apartment. The extra “stuff” didn’t matter, and she was ready to start over. Grief had made her a different person. She still found herself thinking, “I’m a mess.” But she also made a resolution. “I kind of got to a point where I was like, ‘Well, I’ll be God’s mess.’” She had been a frequent donor to UGM and enjoyed reading the Mission News. Though she usually threw them away after reading, one newsletter from spring 2016 stayed on her kitchen table for a while. It had an article about mentors for men and women in recovery. “Every time I would go by it, I would kind of pat it for some reason,” she says. But she had reservations. “I thought maybe I was over the hill too far.” Finally, she decided to call UGM and ask. “They assured me, no, there’s a need for women of all ages and all walks of life. That’s when I met Ann.”

It took longer for Ann to be matched with a mentor than the other women in recovery at Anna Ogden Hall. Looking back, she sees that God knew who she needed. The moment her counselor introduced her to Shirley, Ann knew this was the person she’d been waiting for. Shirley also remembers that moment. “It was a moment for me of just awe ... I thought, ‘What am I going to say to this woman?’ And we turned to each other and we started talking – and we never stopped!” Ann virtually bubbles with what she is learning from Shirley: her knowledge of Scripture, her commitment to continual prayer, her fearlessness, her willing service. She is a role model in the best sense of the word. At heart, though, they are best friends. Shirley compares their relationship to how God instantly “knit the souls” of David and Jonathan together in I Samuel 18.

“God’s given me Shirley, and it just feels like I’ve known her all my life.” – Ann

And that instant connection was reinforced by their past experiences. They talk about their marriages, their childhoods, their children. They’re Midwesterners: Shirley is a Kansas farm girl, while Ann grew up in a huge Wisconsin family. And they each carry what Shirley calls “heavy things” from the past. “Because of that, for us to keep our joy, we have to – what I call – ‘get goofy.’ We have to have time out and just laugh.” Seeing them together, this isn’t a surprise. They love to laugh. But there’s more to it, Ann says. “Shirley is my sister ... a sister that I can call any time of the day or night and I know she will answer her phone, and then [she shows] a godly wisdom.”

“Because of that, for us to keep our joy... We have to have time out and just laugh.”

When Ann moved out of Anna Ogden Hall, she was able to get a place in Shirley’s apartment complex. Shirley tapped her church connections to furnish it – a friend who was downsizing was looking for a new home for a bunch of good-quality furniture, kitchen and housewares. Within 48 hours of Ann’s moving in, they delivered all of it – up two flights of stairs – to make her apartment a home. “I ended up on her doorstep bawling,” Ann says. She had never had such nice things before. But that’s what friends do for each other. And it goes both ways, in big things and little ones. “I heard this knock on the door one morning,” Shirley says. “And here she stands with a cup of coffee in her hand for me. She said, ‘I can’t stay, I’ve got to go to work, but have a good day!’ And those little things mean a lot.” Shirley points to the most important thing she, Ann, and other Christians share: “the ground level at the cross.” Because of their mutual need for His mercy, “We have utmost respect for one another.” When they get together, the thought that they ever saw themselves as “too old” seems ridiculous. “Just because I’m 66 now, it’s not over...I have plenty of life left,” Ann says.