Thank you Wayside Chapel

Wayside is about meeting and connecting people. It is about seeing the real person and not the facade.

It is about looking past the anger and the manipulation and seeing the love. In You. In Me.

It is about connecting our community with our visitors. Wayside has a Strategic Framework unlike any corporate or self help mantra. The strategic framework is all about the visitors, volunteers and staff.

Not one mention of leadership! Thank God for that. We follow and do not lead.

It is a perfect platform from which to operate and connect to community:
Captured by the Awesome – Pulling people out of their day-to-day routine and catching them with the spark of life.

Prophetic Voice– Calling society back to first principles to recognise that we are hard wired as social beings. We need to be part of a community.

Meeting and Moving – Removing the barriers that separate us, so people can be their real selves, and that moments of connection can heal us and drive us towards health.

We all yearn to be our real selves so Wayside takes people out of their comfort zone into a community of ‘no us and them’. The need to be connected in community beats in all of our hearts.
Wayside also has a set of values we can adapt into our daily routine. Have a read:
OPENNESS (NO SECRETS) We have a profoundly simple mission, which is to create a community, and our message and work are undiluted with other agendas.
TEAMWORK (NO COWBOYS) Our goal of creating community is also our method. We work in a collaborative way to invite people out of singular, individual life into the risky and healing place of community.
PATIENCE (NO RUSH) We cannot make people change. If we could, we would be guilty of manipulation of some kind. Instead, we are on the lookout for sparks of life, signs that people long for better, and we look to engage and help people move to better days and better health.
COURAGE (NO COMPLACENCY) It takes courage to confront people who have lost hope and invite them into the world of relationships with responsibility. Wayside is not an intensive
care unit but an invitation into life and community.

RESPECT (NO JUDGES) People have the right to make their own decisions. People have the right to make bad decisions. People who choose singular misery or even death deserve to have their rights respected. Wayside’s mission is not to fix people but to love them and be with them, knowing that if they are really met, they’ll really move toward health and life.

So thank you Wayside for the biggest, craziest, juiciest, emotional, shocking, awesome years of my life.

I am a better man for the experience. I am a more loving and present husband, father, son and friend.

You have shown me I am only one step away from a life I had shunned.

You have taught me to embrace everything my community has to offer;

The good and bad.

The beautiful and the ugly.

Love and hate.

I have met the most amazing people. From the gutter to the boardroom.

And guess what?

We are no different.

Here are 12 Wayside traits we can all bring into our relationships:
– Kindness
– Empathy
– Emotional honesty
– Be curious
– Emotional intelligence
– Be calm
– Belief in self and others
– Acceptance
– Higher purpose
– Gratitude
– Take nothing for granted
– Patience
– Be humble; know your place

And you don’t need a book shelf full of self help manuals to remember this. Just a pencil, and piece of paper and a forgiving heart.

Need to read more?

This is an excerpt from One Day, One Life: P. 136-7. One Day One Life