Stopped at the neighbourhood diner this morning for breakfast. Took the window seat, sipped my coffee, read my book. Next door to the diner is a methadone clinic. Young couple I know emerges from the clinic, spots me and piles into the booth. He's quiet, somewhat reserved; she's raucous. That's normal. She munches on a sugar donut that she leaves half eaten on the table. She can't stop talking - he never says a word. She notices the diner sells poutine and tells me that when she's drunk she can speak fluent French, but only when she's drunk. She knows she can speak fluent French because she was in a conversation with her friend's dog and he understood every word she said. I suggest this might be a sign that she ought not to drink. When she goes to the bathroom her boyfriend opens up to me.

He's living at his sister's place - she's staying with a friend. She was in a rooming house for all of two days before she got into a fight with a housemate. Cops were called and she's up on assault charges. He just got out of jail having served time for assaulting a Children's Aid worker. He shrugs. "I don't think we're going to get our kid back." He thanks me for telling is girlfriend not to drink. He was in jail for two months, he said, and it was the first time his mind had been clear. He realizes now that drinking and drugs make him stupid, make him do stupid things, because he's not thinking clearly. He says it was rough for his girlfriend when he went to jail - she had no where to live and ended up on the street, she took a lot of drugs and drank a lot just to get by. He looks at me and we find ourselves in the unspoken part of the conversation, the part about what else she might have done to survive that time. I say we all just do the best we can with what we have and he seems comforted by it.

You have to live here to get it. Peoples live play out over years; there's no quick fixes, there's no easy answers. You, like they, just have to do the best you can with what you have; a coffee shop encounter is as real a ministry as any other. Jesus is there and it means something. Jesus isn't just in the lofty prayers and beautiful songs (if he's there at all). He's also in the dirty, windswept street outside the meth clinic, in the window seat in a noisy diner, he's in the encounter, in the moment, in the hearts and the lives of those who have given it up for him. As they get up to leave he stands quietly by the door. She, however, does something absolutely uncharacteristic for her loud, brash, foul-mouthed self; something completely out of character. She puts her hand on my shoulder  and says, "God bless you, Rhymes."

And then off they go.