Linwood House Ministries

A Great Room Gala

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Linwood House Ministries invites you to our 'Great Room Gala'!

The Great Room at Abbott and Hastings is a sacred space for women to meet in the downtown eastside. It is a place where we deepen relationships with our friends from the Journey, a three day retreat for women from the downtown community held at Linwood House on the Sunshine Coast. The Great Room is a place of peace, rest, conversation, laughter, creativity, music, reading, prayer, photography, education. It is a place where gifts, talents and dreams are realized and shared with one another. Women leave encouraged to make positive choices on their personal journeys and better equipped to build into the community and world in which they live.

The present Great Room is in a condemned building and will sometime in the near future be torn down. Thankfully we have found a space in a safe location in the downtown eastside for our new Great Room where we can continue to journey with our friends. It is "raw space" and yet we can already picture a place of beauty that will continue to draw the hearts of women to hope and be part of rebuilding the community.

We look forward to the many partners who will join with us in creating this sacred space and we hope to see you on November 21st.

Please pass this on to anyone who might be interested in the work of Linwood House Ministries. If you're not in the Vancouver area, please keep this important event in your thoughts and prayers.

Safe Journey, Sister

I knew something was wrong the moment I walked out of the International Arrivals Hall at YVR on Saturday and saw Pete waiting for me. No offense to Pete, but after 10 days in Ethiopia and 30 hours in transit, I was looking forward to seeing Sue. I had called her several hours earlier from Washington, DC, and I knew she was planning to come to the airport.

“Where are the girls? What’s up?”

“Lou’s in the hospital. She’s on life support.”

With those words I was instantly reminded that one didn’t need to travel half way around the planet to encounter stories of injustice, of sadness, and yet of great courage and inspiration.

Lou was one of our oldest friends at Linwood House Ministries. In fact, you might say that Linwood had grown up around Lou. Sue Ann, Jen, Sue and many other people had journeyed with Lou over the years as she struggled with the demons of addiction, abuse, hopelessness, and the legacy of Canada’s national shame, the First Nations residential school system. There were good times, too. Moments of victory, sometimes temporary, were always celebrated. There was Lou’s baptism, which was shared with many of her friends. Lou wanting to give back by serving others up at Linwood House. Lou managing to maintain her sense of humour in the face of her deteriorating health. In fact, Lou was adapting to the requirements of weekly dialysis when she suffered a massive heart attack, and went too long without oxygen.

Saturday and Sunday were spent by Lou’s hospital bedside with a few friends and her two Aunties, while her brother traveled down from far up the British Columbian coast to make the final difficult decision. On Monday afternoon, surrounded by her family, Lou slipped peacefully away from this world and cast off, once and for all, the many burdens she had been carrying. Somehow it seems appropriate that Sue and Jen were not there, as painful as it was for them. They said their goodbyes on Sunday, and traveled from the hospital to Linwood House to prepare for this week’s Journey, where they will minister to many more friends.

These words have never been more appropriate: Rest in peace Lou.

~ Mike Todd (Reposted from Waving or Drowning)

BOUND: Limited Edition Print

Our incredibly talented friend David duChemin is making a very small number of one of his beautiful prints available. This alone should get many of you excited, but as a bonus David is contributing 25% of the proceeds to Linwood House. Here's the print, and his post on the subject:

My image, BOUND, pictured above, has resonated with many, many people. I’ve had a number of requests for prints, so I am going to offer this as a very limited edition 16×24 print. When they’re gone, they’re gone. What makes it a limited edition? I will only be printing 20 of these in this size, and prints will be signed and numbered before they are shipped to you. Prints will be on metallic paper, shipped rolled. Furthermore, 25% of proceeds will go directly to Linwood House, a Vancouver group that works with the women of Vancouver’s tragic downtown eastside.

Pricing is $200.00+20.00 shipping within North America. If you’re in the US, pricing is in $USD, and in Canada, $CAD.

The image itself is of a woman at the Nizzamudin darga in Delhi, a place of petition and prayer. This woman was prone, praying her heart out. The chains and locks on her wrist, I believe, are signs of a promise that will go unbroken - a pledge. To me they are powerful symbols of something more and my mind immediately lept to the work of my friends at Linwood House.

I am in Kathmandu right now, but will begin taking orders immediately. If you want one, please send me an email and I’ll put you in the queue. There are only twenty, so I’m not taking payment before I confirm you are one of the twenty. #1 is reserved for a special client in Toronto. He knows who he is.

Prints will begin shipping at the end of October. Any questions, please feel free to drop me an email.