Christian Comment with Glenis Massey Trustee of Marah

IT IS often said that unless you walk in another person’s shoes you cannot know very much about their life and how it is.

Marah is open to the needs of those who may have fallen through the safety nets of society, family, care systems, and have landed hard, often hungry, and sometimes financially poor, somewhere between the rock and the hard place.

Trapped by addiction, homelessness, benefit breakdown the most amazing kindnesses break out between the neediest of folk.

Not unlike the landlord of Bethlehem who offers a room to a tired and hungry couple, the woman heavily pregnant, Marah offers a chink of light into a dark experience.

Welcome, acceptance, a non-judgmental helping hand reaches out to those with the greater of life’s struggles.

Early steps see the transition from stranger to fellow traveller, from outsider to the inside, where hope and help go hand in hand.

The basis for the work that is done day to day is unconditional love, sometimes hard to accept, often scorned by the rest of us; it is this love which we believe is God’s love for us, all of us.

The barriers that are so often placed in the way of the love that knows of no conditions are many, lack of trust, even lack of care, wanting a profit is a modern motivation, success is hard to measure when it may be something as small as a momentary step forward, or the first reasoned approach to life’s situations.

Was Mary the mother of Jesus troubled to be away from her home town on the point of giving birth with no roof over her head, I have long since given up on the traditional stable scene, no wooden sheds or candles, just the cold and the dark, the fear and anxiety, and into the midst of that is born the most telling gift of unconditional love.

In the child born at Christmas is all the potential to love that exists in you and in me, at Marah, every hour is spent extending that love to those we seek to serve.