Linwood House Ministries

Linwood Gratitude

Gratitude...
not a place
where
I am
easily
found

Yet amidst
the pain
and grieving
thankfulness
creeps
in...

Laughter
in the kitchen
as
women work together
serving
“The Journey”

A long
hug
in the
embrace of
an Aussie sister,
daughter

Sweet gifts
of sweets
and sweat
from
strangers
and friends
that lighten
my load

A loved one
who rubs
my aching
feet
when sunlight
dims

An
example of
a Father’s
love
in a hug
a squeeze
of an arm
words...
“I can hardly
wait to see you
tomorrow”

A sacred
space to
grow and learn
cry and heal
breathe in and out

A friend
and employer
who journeys
with me
into the
hope
of my
story

I am grateful!

~ Beverley M. Hull

Gratitude For The Journey

Earlier this month, we had ten friends join us at Linwood House for the October Journey. This time of year, the fall harvest, always give us inspiration as we gather our thoughts for our time together. We enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving together, visited a Dahlia farm to enjoy and appreciate the gift of creation at this time of year, and over our three days together, captured some of our personal reflections in gratitude journals that we each made. With a focus on gratitude, we asked three questions of ourselves.

As I look back on my life so far, to what situation or whom do I feel gratitude?

As I sit with the reality of my life as it is today, where do I feel gratitude?

How do I take a spirit of gratitude into my future, into my hopes and dreams?

How can that change me, my relationships and the community I live in?

Here are some expressions of gratitude from our friends.

“I’m so grateful for my eyesight and I can’t believe how beautiful everything is” - Rita

“I’m so grateful for Linwood House, I really needed to get away from all the stress. This home is such a peaceful place” - Toni

“I’m so grateful to God for reminding me of my identity as a mother” - Lydia

“I’m so thankful for the peace I feel in this place, and I’m grateful for the opportunity I have to go to Lydia House” (a recovery home for women with addictions) - Linda

“I’m so grateful for my grandchildren. They are what turned my life around, and gave me a second chance at being the kind of mother I always wanted to be” - Nina

“I’m so thankful for your friendship. I’m so grateful to know that you would give your time and open your home so that we can experience a rest from the stress of our lives” - Catherine

Gratitude is contagious. Having a spirit of gratitude also inspires you to want to give, to take what you have received and pay it forward. Imagine what could happen in our lives, our communities, our world!

Inspired by our three days soaking in gratitude, we decided to make Tuesday in the Great Room our “Guerrilla Goodness” day. For the past three weeks we have met in the morning and taken on the assignment of spreading goodness, kindness and encouragement to the downtown Eastside. One week we passed out handmade notes of life, love, peace and hope to random strangers. Another week we delivered potted flowers to women in a detox and recovery facility. Our assignment this week? Who knows! But we are believing in the power of gratitude and goodness, and know that it can change a heart, a community and a world. If you would like to join us for Guerrilla Goodness Tuesday, or if you have a creative idea of how we can spread the goodness in the downtown Eastside, feel free to email me at suetodd1@gmail.com

~ Sue Todd

Upcoming Linwood House Events!

For our friends in and around the Lower Mainland there are several events coming up that you should know about:

Sunday Afternoon Ladies Tea at the Great Room

In the Downtown Eastside (DTES)

108 W. Hastings (2nd floor) at Abbott

Sunday, November 8th, 2:00-4:00

 

Ladies, you are invited to participate as a host and a guest at a table of welcome where all women are included:  the community, the church and the residents of the DTES.

Hosts (two to a table) will provide everything required for a beautiful, scrumptious High Tea:  tables, chairs, linens, china, silverware, flowers, savory and sweet treats. 

LHM will provide tea, coffee, cream and sugar.

 

Invited guests from the DTES will enjoy tea, treats, a little music and especially your company!  Everyone will hear how our friends from the DTES will be invited to train

as hostesses for the DTES when the world comes to Vancouver for the Olympics.

 

For more information please contact us at info@linwoodhouseministries.org or 604-740-3757

 

 

Annual "Decking of the Halls" (and almost everything else!)

 

Linwood House

Friday and Saturday, November 13th and 14th

 

Are you creative?  Do you love Christmas?  Do you love decorating?  If you do, please consider joining our decorating weekend.  All of Linwood House receives a festive touch

inside and out.  We also welcome gifts of food to feed our decorating teams and volunteers to help in the kitchen.  Please reserve a room with us if you'd like to stay overnight.

This is a fun weekend (although you will work hard) and you will be inspired for your own Christmas decorating.

 

 

2nd Annual "Walk to a Victorian Christmas"

 

Linwood House

3144 Linwood Road

Roberts Creek

Saturday, December 5th, 1:00-4:00

 

Once again Linwood's long, curving driveway will be transformed with scenes and activities to delight the senses:  music, drama, crafts, treats and animals.  The favorites from last year will return:  Dolly the lama, Santa, the craft tent, roasted nuts, the fire pit with marshmallows, the Victorian carolers and the live Nativity Scene.  There will be some new surprises too.  After meandering up the driveway all will visit the beautifully decorated Great Room and experience the warmth and graciousness of Linwood's hospitality  while  listening to live music.  Homemade cookies and hot cider send visitors on their way.

 

Last year we had many friends of LHM visit from the mainland to enjoy the "Walk" with their children and/or grandchildren.  A new tradition perhaps? 

 

As well as being a community event and an occasion to share our dimensions, this is also a fundraiser for LHM - cost is $5 per person or $20 per family.  This year we are asking for donations to provide tickets for needy families on the Sunshine Coast.  No one is turned away.  There is still opportunity for new talent to be showcased and for volunteers.  We hope this will be even bigger and better than last year's!   

The Coast Journey

We are very excited to announce that LHM has begun "Coast Journeys"! For several years we have been bringing groups of women from the DTES (downtown eastside of Vancouver) to retreats known as The Journey at Linwood House where relationships are built, women are encouraged and the love of God is practically demonstrated. We have met many women who left the Sunshine Coast for the streets of Vancouver and we've been thinking how great it would be to be pre-emptive - find those young women and give them support and hope before they find addiction, prostitution, abuse and despair in the DTES.

For twenty-four hours in late August we were privileged to have six compassionate, high-principled young women attend the first Coast Leadership Journey. We have begun a relationship with each of them to support them in becoming creative, expressive, strong women with a purpose and a role to play in their family, church, community and world. Our thought was that we needed some younger women to come alongside their peers who might be at risk to invite them to a Coast Journey at Linwood House. Soon after we started discussing ways to reach the younger women, Union Gospel, a longtime partner in the DTES, asked if we could have four of their very young women to a Journey. When we asked our young leaders if they'd be interested in participating at that Journey - the answer was an overwhelming yes.

~ Sherri Coulthard

Gerry's Work Weekend

Ron is on Cloud Nine.

He celebrated his 65th birthday and got a discount on the ferry and a reduced cost for his hair cut... and that was only the beginning! This past long weekend a team of men led by Gerry Sly, a founding LHM Board member, arrived at Linwood armed with tools, treated wood, and every form of equipment you can imagine. Not only did the equipment arrive but the most amazing team of skilled men you could imagine came with it. For three days the men repaired broken items, built a woodshed, put in some underground sprinkler lines, and tiled the laundry room, to mention just a few of the tasks accomplished. Ron was thrilled and could not have imagined a better birthday present.

Thanks to Eric, Mike, Justin, Gary, Pascal, Andrew, Steve and of course Gerry for giving Ron and our ministry the best present ever. (These men can be found feeding the homeless in Port Moody every Thursday evening.)

See more work weekend photos here.

Linwood Art Experience II

Last weekend's Linwood Art Experience was a great success! Thanks to all those who came out and participated on such a beautiful day.

You can check out photos from the day here.

Linwood Art Experience

3rd Annual
Linwood Art Experience

Sunday, July 19th, 1-5pm

Reserve the day for an exhibition
and sale by talented artists
Ed Hill, Todd Clark,
Brian Romer, Yzabelle Delisle-Milton,
Donna Stewart, Douglas Rae

Join us for an afternoon of Art, Music and Refreshments
in a garden setting



Photography – DTES Women

Music by Trudy Diening and Miles Black

Linwood House Ministries
“Journeying with women into the hope of their story”

(More photos from last year's event here)

Om's Story

Last week I had the privilege of attending the launch of the Buying Sex is Not a Sport campaign. Focusing on the 2010 Olympic Games, it is a campaign headed by Resist Exploitation, Embrace Dignity (REED), and seeks to raise awareness of the documented fact of the increase in the sexual exploitation of marginalized women during major sporting events.

Buying sex is not a sport. It is not a game. Buying sex is not a vacation, a hobby or a pastime. It is not glamorous or sexy. Prostitution is not the oldest profession, rather it is the oldest oppression. It is not Pretty Woman. In fact, half of the victims of sexual exploitation are not women at all, but mere children. They are not there by choice, they do not like sex, they do not aspire to this as a career.

Each woman or child is a daughter, sister, mother, friend, who has been oppressed and marginalized in every way imaginable…..poverty, lack of education, childhood sexual abuse, racial discrimination, foster care. Their stories are as numerous as their faces. This is the story, the face of one.

Om is from Laos. She was born to a father who was an alcoholic, a “butterfly” who would go from village to village and woman to woman. He rejected Om from a very young age, never telling her he loved her, and despising her as his daughter. Om’s mother resented this daughter too, never showing her the love she deserved. To her own mother she became a commodity and at 10 years of age, Om was sold by her mother to a much older man in the village. By the time she was 13 she was pregnant. After her son was born her “husband” left her for another woman and Om returned to live with her mother to have help caring for her son.

When her son was 2 years old, Om’s mother sold her again, this time to a trafficker. One night, Om left her village and walked through the night to get to a clearing in the road. There, she was picked up and put in a refrigerator truck with 50 other women. The space was so small that the women sat on each other’s shoulders, stacked two and three high. They drove for hours through Laos to Thailand, where they were taken to Bangkok and put to work in a bar in one of the red light districts.

It was there that Om would stay for 9 days before we met her, sometimes working 10am to 2am every day, dressed up in the outfit provided to her, and sitting perched on a bar stool trying to look sexy, seductive and interested in the men who would leer and assess and buy her.

The young girl in the refrigerator truck. It was only three weeks ago in Thailand that I met this young girl, heard her story firsthand, held her face, heard how her dreams had been stolen from her, and tried to tell her that she is a child of God……loved, honored, valued, respected, cherished.

This isn’t just an anonymous story.

The young girl in the refrigerator truck……she is my friend.

I often wonder how the façade of choice, the belief that ‘she wants it’ or ‘she seduced me’, would hold up against the harsh reality of her story. A story that is repeated a million times over, every day in every part of the world.

By the sheer grace of God, Om is now safe, having had the courage to say yes to the invitation for a better life, a way out. Her journey to Thailand in the back of that truck was a long one; her journey to healing will be even longer.

~Sue Todd

U.N. System Lacks 'Serious Focus on Gender' Issues, Opinion Piece Says

"The most lamentable and heart-breaking dimension of multilateralism" is the "absence of any serious focus on gender throughout" the United Nations system, Stephen Lewis, founder of AIDS-Free World, writes in a London Independent opinion piece. He adds, "I can cite chapter and verse, but let me start by telling you that whether it is poverty alleviation, or HIV and AIDS, or sexual violence and conflict, the whole panoply of discrimination visited on women around the world, particularly in developing countries, the U.N.'s agencies and the Secretariat have been profoundly delinquent in their response."

According to Lewis, the "struggle for gender equality has become the most important struggle on the planet; the continuing marginalization of 52% of the world's population is simply unacceptable." He adds, "So we're now engaged in an effort to create a new international agency for women, a fascinating undertaking that I hope will engage" governments. "Nothing approximates the possibility of finally having a vehicle that would give voice and resources and support to the struggles of women around the world," Lewis writes, adding, "Everyone knows what's happening in these areas about women's vulnerability but there is never a consistent voice to bring it to the attention of the world community, to continue to hammer it home, to demand action from government." He concludes, "So the emergence and creation of a women's agency I think would be a godsend internationally and would overcome the record of the United Nations on gender" (Lewis, Independent, 5/22).

Buying Sex Is Not a Sport

We at Linwood House Ministries support our friends at REED (Resist Exploitation, Embrace Dignity) and their just-launched campaign built around the coming Olympics, Buying Sex Is Not a Sport.

"Buying Sex Is Not a Sport is a grassroots campaign to raise awareness and effect change around sex trafficking and the 2010 Olympic games. The demand for sexual access to the bodies of women and children fuels human trafficking. Women and children in Metro Vancouver and Whistler are routinely coerced into the flesh trade to meet this demand, and a large sporting event such as the 2010 Olympics will only further exploitation through a rise in the demand for paid sex.

 The very workings of human trafficking are a market-based model of supply and demand. There is an uncontrolled male demand for sexual access to the bodies of women (and children) and the supply for this demand is met through violating the dignity of women. It is our conviction that in order to stem the tide of human trafficking we must end the demand for paid sex. Demand flourishes in an atmosphere of anonymity.

This campaign will spread the message broadly through community-based public forums, postering campaigns, t-shirts, buttons and your creative ideas."