CHRIST IN WINTER:
Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—
Jennie Edwards Bertrand, one of my “kids” in the ministry, who is the pastor of Hope UMC in Bloomington, IL sent me the link to an article about how PATH of Bloomington-Normal is now the call center for all of Illinois for the 988 suicide-crisis hot line. They get more than 300 calls per day.
Little did we know… when Jim Pruyne and I started PATH in 1971, what it would become.
The campus ministers at Illinois State University—in Normal, the sister city to Bloomington—worked together, sometimes, in a loose conglomerate. Nothing official, although Jim thought it was.
Jim was the Presbyterian campus minister at Illinois State University. He was a creative type who had lots of good ideas for ministry. He thought that since we campus ministers were an association, with him as the de facto head, since he had been there the longest, that he should think up ministries and other campus ministers—Lutheran, Baptist, Episcopal, and Methodist--should carry out his ideas.
That sort of approach never works very well, for obvious reasons. It was especially insufferable for me, because I also had lots of ideas for how to do campus ministry and was more interested in carrying out my own ideas.
That didn’t mean we couldn’t work together, though. Jim and I had already started a problem pregnancy counseling service, when abortion was illegal in Illinois.
Then drugs started showing up. Depression followed. So did suicide. Students came to talk over their problems with campus ministers, but we were family guys who went home by midnight. Students stayed up all night. So Jim installed an extra telephone in his building—352-PATH—and told the other campus ministers to recruit students who could stay up at night to answer the phone and tell kids not to commit suicide. We thought he was insufferable, but we did, because it was a good idea. It was the PATH to help, or officially, Personal Assistance Telephone Help.
I was already working on an idea of my own, HELP, which was exactly what it says. I thought Bloomington-Normal should have a central organization that provided any sort of help needed by any person, student or not. I did not think of HELP doing all the helping itself. The folks who answered the phone would have a directory of all helping agencies and could direct people to the right place.
I called together a number of people in Bloomington and Normal who were known to be helpers. We formed a board. We called HELP into being
There were plenty of holes in the social services network in those days--such as transportation for folks to the social service agencies, and to doctors, etc—so HELP began to recruit its own helpers, too, to fill the holes.
Jim suggested that since PATH already had a telephone that was peopled 24 hours per day, we should use it for HELP. So we did. And PATH became not just a suicide/crisis line, but a one-path-to-help, any kind of help.
Today it is what we envisioned, that one PATH to any sort of HELP. But it’s especially gratifying to see that it has expanded so far beyond its original purpose, as a suicide/crisis hotline, not just for one campus, but for the whole state.
I’m sorry that Jim Pruyne is not alive to see it; he would be insufferably proud.
John Robert McFarland
I found a framed Edward Guest's poem 'Don't Quit' at a Good Will store in Annandale, Virginia. Apparently there is doubt about Guest's authorship. The Internet has versions with different words too. My framed version didn't even have the third stanza. I'll defer to English and Literature majors' expertise. I chose the words I liked the most. I find the poem inspiring. Enjoy.
ReplyDeleteDon't Quit
When Things go wrong, as they sometimes will,
When the road you're trudging seems all uphill,
When the funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to Smile but have to sigh.
When care is pressing you down a bit,
Rest, if you must, but never quit.
Life is queer with its twists and turns,
As everyone of us sometimes learns,
And many a failure turns about,
When he might have won if he'd stuck it out,
Stick to your task, though the pace seems slow,
You might succeed with one more blow.
Often the struggler has given up,
When he might have captured the victor's cup.
And he learned too late, when the night came down,
How close he was to the golden crown,
Success is failure turned inside out,
The silver trail of clouds of doubt,
And you never can tell how close you are,
It may be near when it seems afar,
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit,
It's when things seem worst that you mustn't quit.
Thanks, David. I like that poem, too, but I haven't seen it for a long time. In a similar vein, I like Kipling's "If," especially the line, "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two imposters just the same..."
ReplyDelete