Since August, I’ve been working as the Teen Girls’ Field Worker for Wheeler Mission Ministries, at their community center on Michigan. The community center includes Family, Hispanic and Youth Services, focused on the near-east side of Indianapolis. As a field worker, I was running the weekly teen girls club, along with the activities, home visits and phone calls that go with building relationships with girls in this largely impoverished area of town. The community center youth services runs activities for boys and girls, from age 5 to high school. That’s the background.

Monday, Feb 10th.

The Friday before, my boss (Director of Youth Services) called a last-minute prayer meeting for Monday. I had assumed this had to do with our recent staffing struggles, as both our activities director and teen boys’ field worker had resigned, and both myself and another coworker had been off sick. I was mistaken. At the prayer meeting, we were giving scattered, vague information that our jobs were all in danger. (I should note that the vagueness wasn’t due to my boss not wanting to share information, but had to do with the fact he was not given adequate information.) We learned that a staff meeting had happened on Saturday which would determine the fate of the community center. Our boss had not yet heard the outcome of the board meeting, despite making phone calls to attempt to gather that information.

That previous week, I had also been contacted by the director of Outreach, Inc, asking for a formal interview between myself and their leadership team about the possibility of joining their staff as a case manager. Outreach, Inc. is an organization dedicated to serving homeless and at-risk youth in Indianapolis through their drop-in center, street outreach, relational guidance, job/education assistance, and case management.

Given the fact that the position offered almost double what I was getting paid at Wheeler (I was having to juggle the additional jobs as part-time nanny and picking up shifts at Starbucks in order to make ends meet), and full benefits (which I hadn’t had in a year, since working full-time at Starbucks), and because Outreach has an amazing reputation, and is more closely aligned with what I believed God was calling me to do, we arranged for the interview on the morning of Feb 14th.

Tuesday, Feb 11th.

From my understanding, my boss at Wheeler attempted to make more phone calls to leadership at Wheeler, and his calls were not being answered. We still did not know the state of our jobs or the community center and it’s ministries.

Thursday, Feb 14th.

9am: I meet with the leadership team of Outreach, Inc over coffee for a formal interview. The interview (as far as I could tell at the time!) goes well.

3pm: I get a call from our administrative assistant at Wheeler, who leaves a message that a meeting is being held for all staff at 4:30 and that “I’ll probably want to be there”.

4:30pm: All the youth, family and hispanic ministries staff gather at the community center, to find the four top directors of Wheeler waiting for us…and we know what’s coming. We are informed that the community center will be closing, and all the ministries at the center will be ceasing. End-of-the-year giving was short by approximately 300k, and cuts had to be made. They decide to cut all “non-residential” programs, in order to focus on residential homeless and addictions recovery programs. At this point, none of us were surprised by this. What did surprise us is that they were giving us two weeks: til February 29th. Two weeks to end club and say goodbye to our kids. Two weeks.

Friday, Feb 15th.

I get a call from Megan at Outreach, asking me to come to an all-staff interview and meeting on Wednesday.

Wednesday, Feb 20th.

12:30. I attend an all-staff meeting at Outreach, Inc, in which I’m grilled by those in attendance. After a 20-minute break, I’m officially offered a job as Case Manager at Outreach, Inc. I start training Feb 25th. (For those reading closely, you’ll note I actually have a week of overlap pay and work this coming week, our last week of clubs. This is an additional blessing!)

And so that’s that. I was laid-off and hired in my new position within five days. There are so many other details that make this much more miraculous than it even seems here (ex: I nanny for a little girl…and when her mother was having her new baby, she was not going to go back to work, and would no longer need me. This was going to be a bigger cut to my finances. She’s due on Feb 25th. So as of next week, I would have also been out of my nanny job as well.). Not only can I now make ends meet with only one job….it’s coming through a job that I genuinely feel that I was made for.

That said, please note that there are hundreds of kids who will no longer have a “safe place” to go to at the community center on the east side of Indianapolis. Many of my coworkers (eight apart from myself) were laid off with no severance or options to take other jobs within the organization. Several other coworkers were offered jobs elsewhere…but now have to struggle with that decision, given that most of them do not feel called to homeless adults ministry, but rather, urban youth ministry. These are friends and children I dearly love, and they would welcome your prayers.

But for me….after a year of financial struggles, and mounting bills (mostly due to my car accident last year, when I had no health insurance), I can finally feel like a fully-functioning, self-supporting, 26-yr-old with a college degree that evidently wasn’t all for naught.

I am blessed with community, blessed with a calling, blessed with a burden.

(So, you don’t have to feel badly about your comment - or lack of - last week, Cameron. :))

***If you are so inclined, you are welcome to find out more about Outreach in the following videos:

 Outreach Inc. - Mad World

Outreach, Inc. - Have a Little Faith