Matthew’s Question to Madison: Why do you want to live in an area of the city that’s often pushed to the side?

My initial response to this question was simple:

“Because it’s just where my heart is.”

How do I explain my heart?

There are many factors, and though I probably can’t explain half of them, part of it can be traced back to my childhood.

I grew up in Guelph, Ontario, and for those first 8 years, I lived the best life. Our family was snug in the middle of a street with four houses lining each side. It was a small street that descended down a hill, bordered by train tracks at the bottom. Beyond that was a forest with a stream winding its way through the lush trees.

Of all eight houses on the street, every home had children living there within five years of my brother and I. We spent a lot of time together. We’d close down our street in the summer to have neighbourhood BBQs, and we’d close down our street in the winter to sled down it. We had a pool and playground in our backyard, and you could find all the kids there in the summer. Our other neighbour had an ice rink during the winter, and we’d all lace up our skates and try not to collide into one another.

But best of all. Every Sunday my parents would whip out the griddle and make dozens and dozens of pancakes. It was Pancake Sunday. All the kids would walk over early in the morning, and we’d all gather around the table and drown our pancakes in syrup. Then everyone would pile into vans and we’d go to church together.

My childhood was the definition of community. We shared so much together. And that’s where I believe my heart for community stems from.

Once we moved to London, I never really experienced the strength and depth of a neighbourhood community like that again.

When I walk into this one neighbourhood though, my heart can sometimes literally flutter because of the community feeling. It doesn’t have any equivalent to Pancake Sunday, or an ice rink to skate on in the winter. It doesn’t have neighbours who always communicate well together or kids who all get along. It’s not littered with wealth (it’s littered with litter), or full of parents who are actively engaged in their kids’ lives.

It’s a place many people would never dare think of entering.

But I LOVE that place.

And it rips my heart to pieces to hear people make negative comments about that place. The people who live there are people I dearly love, and kids I see so much potential in – yet they are often stripped down to nothing because of an outsider’s perspective.

“Well, she’ll be pregnant before 18.”

“He’ll be in jail pretty soon.”

“Oh that school there is a no good place.”

“I would never go there – it’s violent, and I fear I’m going to get murdered.”

My heart breaks just writing those words. And sure, they’re not all word for word things I’ve heard, but it’s the true thought behind other comments.

I’ve spent the last five years of my life investing into this community as an outsider, and I so deeply yearn to be an insider. To live there full time; to have an open door home where it will be full of kids after school; to be able to look out my window to see neighbours sitting on their porch, and go join them; to grow up with the kids as they become youth and the stigma around where they live becomes way more real to them.

Even as an outsider, I still KNOW that community, and I see the potential in my friends and the kids there. I pray for those kids often, begging God to do a good work in their lives despite their circumstances – and to allow me to have a front row seat in the action.

Why those kids, in particular, have captured my heart? I can only give credit to the Holy Spirit. The depth of my love for that community is real and raw – it hurts. I’ve never been in love, but if this is what love feels like, wow!

But I also feel the love of God in a way I experience nowhere else.

I once had a vision of a cloud shadowing over the neighbourhood. But then the cloud parted and a stream of light broke through. The light got bigger, illuminating everything below it.

I then had this gut feeling,

“God’s going to do something wild here!”

When you see and hear God somewhere, there’s no place you’d rather be. It’s captivating. It’s inspiring. It’s life transforming.

It’s something so hard to explain – it just is. It’s just an inner desire, an inner urgency, to do life more closely with them. And though moving there is not my immediate next step, it doesn’t downplay the fact that I desperately want to be present all the time – to be closer to them, and to be closer to God (not because God is more present there, but because that’s where His heart is for my heart to be).