Aid to Discernment: ministry re Homelessness

University Friends Meeting continues to be a SHARE shelter; we are not at unity longer term about some do less / do more / do different questions but at last Meeting for Business Friends suggested asking ourselves the question what are the benefits of being a SHARE shelter.

A.  Here is what came to RantWoman:
The Benefits of Being a SHARE shelter


1. Being a SHARE shelter makes UFM much more responsible neighbors than just letting whoever and whatever happen when we used to have people sleeping under our eaves.

2. SHARE is self-managed. This means MUCH lower administrative costs than other models of support for the homeless. More importantly, this model draws on the Inner Light of the people involved and enables them to participate directly in deciding things about their lives and community.

3. I have a relative who struggles with homelessness; he is very hard to help. Having a SHARE shelter means what I can do matters even if it does not directly help my family member.
4. Last winter I threw myself an UnBirthday party. The weather was just AWFUL and some of my friends and family did not come. Because I invited SHARE, the room was still full of warm chatter and people who need to talk about the God of the bus and the library as much as I do.

5. Even talking about bedbugs makes some people itch. It's good for us as acommunity to have to think about this and other hard realities.


B. RantWoman dutifully emailed her thoughts in the direction of those coordinating the seasoning and got back the thought that everyone's contributions will be consolidated and reported together.

C. RantWoman KNOWS that discernment is not necessarily supposed to look like the next comments which came to her, but such is the state, today, of RantWoman's Be True to Her Light reflection on the collecting process at least. God's work in progress?:

I think I am completely at ease with however you all want to presentthing. I think that but I also am interested in both the range of things people comment about, that is the number of different topics and how many comment about individual topics. Sometimes I get grouchy when too many of the things I mention but others do not get omitted. not every puddle of prose that drips out of my email is completely profound but part of the beauty of discernment sometimes is hearing things Iwould not think of.

As NPYM's current presiding clerk likes to say "discernment will occur..."

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from the blog roll, on discernment, in honor of Inveterate Gardener Friend who says, without any irony about evangelism, prosletyzing..., Quakerism is thecure for all kinds of problems of our age:
http://sheffieldquakers.blogspot.com/2012/08/on-being-quaker-and-quakerism.html