The official Dancing Deer Baking Company Blog

Our experience at the Night of Peace Shelter was, like every other shelter I have visited, extraordinary. Each of these places is unique not only in its form, population and approach, but emotionally unique for me as well. Before leaving for this trip I meant to write down my expectations so I could see which ones proved out and which were wildly off base. Here’s one. I would have thought that after 8 days I would cease to be so surprised and moved and might just have become exhausted. But it’s just the opposite.




At the end of the evening we were back in the RV digesting the day, looking at photos, thinking how to make sense of it all and we heard a knock on the door. It was Pastor Colin who came to say good night. He wanted to tell us that the evening had set in motion a number of unexpected and positive things. He is going to send his thoughts to us so I’ll leave the telling of those things to him. At the start of the evening he gave me a wonderful tour and explained the focus of the shelter is on safety and stability as a base for families to repair and move forward. The shelter can house 7 families who are able to stay for several months at a time. The Boy Scouts helped to build seven small rooms with partitions and closets, and a local contractor donated labor and materials adding up to 30k or so. There is a large bathroom with shower, washer and dryer and they have use of the church’s large commissary kitchen. It was just after Pastor Colin left that I thought of replaying my video of his tour and discovered I’d lost the whole thing. I debated for a moment what to do, then grabbed the camera and ran inside to see if I could recapture some of it. Everyone I met was so proud of the shelter, and I wanted to be able to share it. The solutions they had come up with were also quite different from others we’d seen. So I ran inside and caught the families at bedtime just minutes before lights out. I felt comfortable doing that because we’d had such a wondrous evening together.



We’d been invited for dinner and that was a first. The kids were dying to get through dinner so we could get on to the Gingerbread Houses. But dinner itself turned in to a series of surprise musical moments, another first (see “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and “I want to be a singer” videos). I met a young man who was staying in shelter with his fifth child. His first four children from another marriage live with their mother. I hadn’t yet met a single father in shelter. Another shelter joined us and that hadn’t happened before either.

But what has happened at every shelter we’ve visited is that I experience powerful connections with these individuals and as each day passes, feel more and more removed from the stresses of my own life. They not only recede in to the background but when they do float in to my conscious thoughts, they seem so much less difficult than the day I climbed on the plane to Atlanta.