Home?
What is home? That is a question I am faced with today. At the risk of being kitschy, is it “where the heart is”? Is it where your stuff is? Is it where your family and friends are?
The Rohs St. Cafe, my cafe, has had a fire. Worse than that; Universtiy Christian Church, which is connected to it, my church, has been burned too. I am still in shock; how can this be? I was there just last evening, shortly before they closed at 7pm, and everything was fine.
As I understand it, this is what happened:
The fire started in an old electrical wire in a back corner of the sanctuary. It spread upwards to the balcony, the beautiful old wooden balcony with it’s funny white wood slat-footed pews, and the balcony is gone now. It spread outwards, ruining the audio video stand and all of the equipment in it. Here its progress was checked by, get this, stacks of Bibles. The fire went into the bibles, it scorched and twisted their covers a bit, but the paper in it was so dense that when it got into the pages it smothered for lack of air. It stopped there, because there was a Bible study meeting there last night and they smelled smoke and got everyone out and called the fire department. So there is no balcony left and there’s a hole in ther floor, but rest of the sanctuary is going to be alright once we can get it cleaned up. I have no idea what the childrens’ area is like; it is directly beneath the sanctuary so if there’s a hole in the floor then my guess is that the childrens are is bad too. And we had almost finished the beautiful colorful murals painted on the walls down there; it was almost a year-long process.
The cafe is fine, really; just a terrible mess from smoke damage and we can’t get in to clean it up because of air quality problems.
The pros have been in to inspect the place and they say it will be a month before the cafe can be operational again, four months before we can be back in the sanctuary to have church.
To begin with, let me say that I know we will find a way to carry on. We will find a place to meet somewhere. And we will find the money to fix and replace everything too; God will provide. But at the moment things look pretty bleak. We just held a three-year capital campaign to fix the roof and remodel the cafe and childrens’ area. Wherever will the money come from? And while God’s timeing is perfect and for everything there is a season, I must say it seems a shame that it happened just now! The church and Focus have each been growing tremendously in the past six months; beyond all expectations. Still, that said, I know that the congregation will survive.
But the thing that is a real loss is the community that was thriving in that cafe. It had truly become a third place for so many of us; to the point that when one of my regular’s ex-boyfriends came in to the cafe one day while we were sitting there at the bar– like we do every day– she told me she felt violated. How dare he come in to her cafe? And it was like that for all of us: it was our cafe! It is where we met each other and spent time together and lived life together. I don’t know their phone numbers in order to get together with them; I don’t know when I’ll see them again.
One of my friends asked me as we walked back from class together today: So where will you go now? Home? She knows that I usually go to the cafe after class. And now I can’t. And it was then that I realized: the cafe is home. The regulars are my family. To say that I am going home when I am really just going back to the house I live in: it is a joke, in some ways. I don’t mean to say that I don’t love being in my bedroom because I do, and luckily I haven’t lost all of my belongings the way I would have if my house had caught fire. But still, I’ve lost my home. And I feel shocked and bereaved, and it’s going to take me a while to grasp this one.
And on a more selfish note, I was doing two final projects for school on the cafe. I’m half-way through them and they are due next week! What am I gonna do?!?
