One of our dinner regulars got cleaned up off the booze. He was doing so well. I hadn't seen him for about six weeks but, based on how well he was doing I wasn't particularly worried. Saw him at dinner again and he tells me that he spent most of that time in jail. Of course, when he got out the room he was renting is gone, along with the furniture and anything else he might have owned in the world. He was drinking again, and taking a bed in the Mission after dinner.

A woman who has drank most of her life away has been - for several months - sober. It's been amazing to see her grow lighter and finer with each passing day. Tonight we passed one another on the sidewalk, both of us on the way home. She had been drinking. She smiled and said hello as she passed. I just felt the terrible burden of it all. You have to see that burden coming, and know it for what it is, and refuse to take it as your own. You can't. The accumulated weight of all those lives shrouded in all that death... will simply kill you. So you wonder about the ones who are absent, and hope for the best. You wait. You see. You wish it weren't so.

That's what they don't tell you about this ministry when you start - that's there's no end to it. There's no point at which you can claim a victory - no matter how small - because it's only a matter of time until that too is snatched away. So you just keep showing up, and doing the best you can, and praying them out the door at the end of the night, because you need to stand there, you need to hold that light against the darkness, you need to know that your life means something, too.