Mending Hearts

Last night, I was privileged to help out at a benefit dinner for a local charity called Mending Hearts. It is a program started by two women, Katrina Frierson and Charlotte Grant, whose goal it is to provide women in addiction and basically at the bottom of society with a transitional living facility, support services, and access to clothing and jobs.

Ok. All of that is a fairly dry way of saying that Mending Hearts is an absolutely amazing group of people. The stories that I heard last night... I heard of women addicted to meth and crack who are six months clean. Six months! These women were hooked on crack when Connor was born! I heard of women who had lost all contact with their families, and only after being in Mending Hearts did they reunite. A woman whose 13 year old son hung himself who because of the women at Mending Hearts got to be with him before he died. Women who are learning and relearning everyday what grace and love mean. This is a work that is taking the love of Christ into some of the darkest places of this world and pulling women back from the brink of absolute devastation. Do all of them stay with it? No they don't. Do some take advantage of it? Yes they do. But to look in the eyes of those women who are daily fighting their addictions and demons and failures and see... hope, to see a chance for life, and just how grateful they are for another day and another chance is what the Kingdom of God is truly about.

Zane Williams, who played last night at the benefit (btw, Zane, Hurry Home made me cry... again), once said that it is perfectly appropriate to pray and ask God to feed the hungry, go out and give a meal to someone hungry, then go back and thank God for answering your prayer. This is one of those times where those prayers that we pray about the Kingdom coming on Earth as it is in Heaven can come to fruition.

If you have the means, please donate to Mending Hearts. They have a PayPal link on their site and you can donate, even if you're not here in Nashville. If you are here in Nashville and have the ability, go down and visit them. See these women in their place of need and joy. Find ways that you can help. If you have a blog, talk about this work. Put a link to Mending Hearts and let your readers know about what goes on there. Even if you haven't updated your blog in six months, do a quick post with a link to Mending Hearts. This is a work of God and supporting it is doing the work of the Kingdom. It's continuing Jesus' work that he left for us to do.