When I first started coming to the Well in the summer of 2016, I was a lot more put together than I am now. I had firm biblical-theological convictions, a Pentecostal fervor, and a desire to live out my faith in every sphere of life. But I didn’t know just how broken I was. I say I was “put together,” but that doesn’t mean that I was put together in the right way. And it was my friendships with people in the Downtown East Side that slowly revealed that to me.

Through mutually transformative friendships I began to see what a people-pleaser I was, how easily I can be manipulated by people with ill intent. I began to see how all of my lofty prayers and petitions were only good insofar as they help people to feel loved. They rarely ever acted as the charismatic “quick fix” that I wished them to be. I also began to see how desperately I seek out broken and hurting people and try to love them, because I didn’t know how to love myself. But through mutually transformative friendships I also began to experience an unconditional love that would never reject me, because it came from a community of people who had all too often been rejected time and time again by society, and kept on loving anyways.

As Mother Theresa has written, "I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love."