Tea Time

There is a ritual at The Welcome Center that began quite by accident.

One afternoon, in the early months of The Welcome Center, I brought out my little plastic hotpot that my husband gave me so that I might have tea at my desk. I filled it with water, plugged it in and sat down at one of the round tables where people folks had gathered, but not saying much. Though we have pots of hot water run through our coffee maker, I am one of those people who likes my tea water to be McDonald's boiling hot and not tasting like coffee.
I also brought out what our guests began to refer to as my "special tea" (peppermint) from home.

I didn't think much about this other than I was going to have my afternoon tea as I talked with some of our guests. It wasn't long, though, before people started asking if they could have some of that "special tea" made with water from my "special pot." Soon, 3:00 became known as "Tea Time with the Pastor"---a time to gather around one of the tables, choose from a variety of herbal teas (now with two special pots), share a tea-time treat, and have conversation.

I love tea-time at The Welcome Center, and on Tuesdays I move right from our Welcome Church service in the large room next door into The Welcome Center room where folks are gathered and waiting for me to join them for tea.

I love tea-time for many reasons, but mostly because it is such a normalizing and social activity.

Still, our conversations vary a bit in context from most Wanamaker Crystal Tea Room kind of talk.

Today, one person shared how he had been arrested twice this past week for loitering. Someone else jumped in to to share the frustration of shelters and cafes being too full to accommodate people during this cold and rainy weather but getting kicked out of the train stations with no other inside place to go. Another very resourceful person said that if you buy a train ticket a little after the last train, then you could stay in the station until the first train in the morning, allowing five "legal" hours inside. And someone else shared how when he was arrested for loitering, the police took away the crochet hook I had given him for the small animals he crochets because it was a "weapon."

I shared my dream of opening a drop-in center in one of the vacant shops at Suburban Station.

One guy said, "You really are crazy...they don't want us there." But someone else shared how if we did this, she thought we could get many volunteers to paint, decorate and maintain such a facility. So then someone else talked about the need for more affordable housing. And another talked about jobs and maybe a business we could start together so that they could pay for the housing...and the conversation became filled with ideas and dreams and I dare say...hope.

All this, as we sipped a very expensive brand of white tea that had been donated, and shared another misspelled birthday cake that cut to look like a fancy tea-time treat.

OK. So we're not the Crystal Tea Room. And we don't have a chandelier. But we are The Welcome Center and these folks are the heartbeat of The Welcome Church and for that special 3:00 hour on Tuesdays and Fridays, we do have a roof overhead in a lovely Center City space.

So, maybe it wasn't such an accident that prompted me to drag my little hot pot out of my office and into the large room that day after all.

Oh, yeah. We found another crochet hook for our friend to keep on crocheting his little dogs.