Video Transcript: Helping the Needy

We came to Wyoming to visit a foster son of ours who’d become a cowboy in the Dubois area and I was depressed though, because I had nothing to do and I was visited by an Episcopal priest who heard that I was depressed. He saw that I wasn’t eating or making a fire to keep warm, so he made a fire in the stove and heated up soup and listened to all my complaints, and then I decided I wanted to be like that. I wanted to be a monk who would live in the monastery of the world and visit all the poor people and the people in trouble.

So the Episcopal priest took me around on all his pastoral visits. Then when he left Dubois he said he left his ministry with me. So I took that very seriously, and after a while I applied to the Bishop of Wyoming to become a servant of God forever, with voluntary poverty involved because deacons are not paid.

So I went through seven years of study, because I had a husband and children and I had responsibilities. I couldn’t go away to seminary. I read a lot of books and took a lot of courses and did some field work, and then I was ordained in 1991 on January 26^th to become a servant of God forever.

I spent almost all of my time visiting or working with or trying to help people who were down and out, lonely, depressed, drug addicted, alcoholic, homeless, or simply desperate, and I spent all of my time trying to make their lives better.

I had Quaker friends with whom I helped raise money for women with crisis pregnancies and I also worked with battered women. I took crisis calls for a long time. Part of that involved, we did alternatives to violence workshops in the prison system with my Quaker friends and then later on I began making personal visits to prisoners. For ten years, every week, I spent a day in maximum security with my funny felon friends and they seemed to like my visits because I made them laugh.

Some of them had done terrible things. Maximum security is for people who have murdered or raped and done horrible, horrible things. But I went there thinking, “Well, there but for the grace of God go I.”