“the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God (Ruach Elohim) was hovering upon the surface of the water.” Genesis 1:2 (Alan International Version)

Without doubt Wednesday morning holds the greatest potential in my week, every week, for chaos. It’s also one of the highlights of my week, every week. As a Storehouse team we gather to pray at 9:15. Not normally something that should invite chaos but we’re learning that when you gather to pray with an open door in a space where the marginalised and vulnerable are always welcome, chaos may just come find you; in a beautiful and surprising way.

After prayer the rest of the morning is given over to Storehouse Home. A fairly unstructured, drop-in, breakfast environment filled with good food, coffee, chat, overly competitive uno and usually a guitar/double bass/ukelele soft rock classics medley thrown in for good measure. If you’ve never encountered it, forming a mental image of all that swirls in a 2-hour window is near impossible.

We’ll see somewhere between 50 and 80 folks from every possible background come join the melee. Some currently experiencing homelessness, some caught in active addiction. There will be some who are seeking asylum and so currently unable to work. Others will be out of work for health reasons or age or both. Some will be hungry, some will be lonely, some will simply want the heat and some are desperate for help. Some will have come to help and in the “helping” realised they might just have some needs themselves and through the swirl, amidst the raw and honest conversations, laced through the occasional tears, there is always laughter.

When you fill any space with an eclectic mix of people, chaos is always a possibility. When that mix happens to contain those currently facing some of the worst that life can throw at you, doing all they can to move forward under the weight of immense pain and difficulty the potential rachets up a little. Add to that mix, some wrestling with mental illness or poor mental health, the influence of one or more substances and the proclivity of those of us trying to help to veer towards a “fixing” mentality and you’re verging on chaos powder keg territory and yet explosion rarely comes.

Just as the “ruach”, the spirit of God hovered over chaos in creation and spoke order into it so there is a sense of hovering over our little room in North St. A hovering over the broken English conversations, the laugher filled uno, the (sometimes) patient waiting for more bacon, the butchered Tom Petty and the snoring of someone finally safe enough to allow sleep to come. The hovering is both tangible and imperceptible. It depends what way you tilt your head, what lens you view the room with. Are lives being radically transformed? Not usually in an instant but in the slow hovering, moment by moment, conversation by conversation, welcome after welcome the chaos gives way to the order of how it was meant to be.

We all want the dramatic. We want to see broken and busted up lives made whole but in my experience it’s much slower, less dramatic work than we’d like. In 1 John 3,  John writes about Jesus “destroying” the works of the enemy but that word can also be translated loosening or detangling. I find that much more appropriate. We encounter so many amazing people tangled up in chaotic and confusing circumstances. To try to force order and solutions upon them would often do more damage than good but to create spaces where the breath of the divine can hover gently. Where everyday conversations can flow. Where connections and even friendships can form across the barriers that would so often divide. That’s where detangling is made possible. That’s where the whispers of heaven, of how it was always meant to be, begin to breath order into chaos, begin to call beauty out of seeming mess, begin to sow the seeds of hope.

We all want the dramatic but it is in the mundane, in the often imperceivable, the seemingly unimportant encounters of our lives that the possibility of real hope hovers oh so gently. What potential chaos might we be invited to breath order into today simply by choosing to be present?