Life on Wellie Park

I’ve been here almost exactly a month now, and have definitely grown to appreciate the household life round these parts. For one, it’s not a bad place. 23 Wellington Park was in one of it’s former manifestations an art gallery. Right now there’s quite a collection of Jamie Treadwell originals about. Jamie is a brother who spent years living here and serving with YI (Youth Initiatives, cross community youth work). He used to retransform the house into a gallery periodically to sell some of his works to fundraise for the ministry.

Much more important then the bricks and mortar are the brothers who live here. There are eight of us here in the house. Four life long brothers, one fully committed (that’d be me), and three gappers. I’ll have to let you know what the gap program is more fully in the future, but the short description is gappers are young men and women taking a year to do volunteer missionary work and seek personal growth in discipleship.

Peter DeMarais is my roommate. The youngest guy in the house comes in at a trim 5’11 and ¾, just shy of nineteen years, born and raised in Minnesota. He was on the varsity wrestling team since the eighth grade, so I’m careful to maintain a good rapport between the two of us, it just wouldn’t do to get pinned in two point three seconds by a guy nine years younger then me. He’s serving mostly with YI and is also the main weekday cook and shopper at the house.

Noel Delgadillo is a Nica (Nicaraguan) from Miami. He just finished his degree back in Florida at FIU and is serving here in Belfast with both TEC and YI. Along with leading his high school youth group and the small UCO back in Miami he managed to run a couple years of cross country at university. Noel is our houses secret weapon in the fall of aught seven servants of the word ten K challenge. The houses here, in Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Monterrey are going to get their top three or five members to run an official 10 K race and compare the times. I’m supposed to be much faster then I currently am. My training has been hampered by a bothersome chest cold that doesn’t want to let me go (there are much worse things in life).

Georges Farhat is a giant Lebanese, six foot and a couple few inches, and nearly half that width at the shoulders. He would be an intimidating sight if he wasn’t always grinning, laughing, and full of joy. One of the inspiring things about living with Georges has been seeing his response to adversity. A few days after he arrived we were hiking in a place called Glenariff. Georges and I were checking out a ravine down into the glen different from the way we had hiked up. We decided it looked passable, but you couldn’t see far enough to be sure. I left Georges taking a little nap in the sunshine and went down the way we came up. He decided to go for the new route, got to a tricky bit where he couldn’t go backward, slipped while jumping across a wee chasm, wedged his leg into a cleft, and found himself face to face with a bleached sheep’s skull testifying to the frequent use of his chosen route. After screaming to no avail for a half hour he hauled himself out and hobbled his massive frame down the rest of the cliff side bringing along his skull. Upon arriving back an hour and a half late he was still in good spirits and thankful for being protected. Later he came down with a cold, fever, and all around nasty bug which knocked him out for much of a week and thanked the Lord for the great opportunity he had for extra prayer.

Georges is also a wonderful cook. He spent the better part of two days preparing a Lord’s Day feast for us last night. It included three full courses (the first including six dishes) and arak. I can’t remember all the names but it included homous, baba ganoush, fatoush, schwarma, and several other exotic sounding tasty dishes. Not being fully Lebanese we rushed things and only took about two and a half hours at table instead of the customary four.

The life long brothers here are really an inspiring bunch, and I’m learning a tremendous amount about living this life well from them. In the interest of not going on forever I’ll have to describe them later, but their names are Dave Quintana (aka Q), Bruce Yocum, Doug Smith, and Martin Steinbereithner.

The life we share together is rich. We have morning prayer together throughout the week, evening prayer four days a week, night prayers five days, and a regular Saturday prayer time and celebrative meal called a Lord’s Day celebration. The house is a bit of a hub for all kinds of activities. A couple mornings a week I’m helping to run some training for gappers. There’s a prayer meeting every other week, various small groups for TEC, and periodic events for Charis community all meeting here on various evenings. All told it’s a great house to be a part of. This is a great place for me and I’m grateful the Lord has put me here for the year. I hope to show some of you what’s going on here in person over the next year (hint hint).