Orchanized Chaos

Keller Deal's desk looks as though it was hit by a mail truck. Stacks of papers spill over everything and there is the appearance of total disorganization yet when I ask her for anything she somehow magically pulls it out from underneath a large stack that appear to be on the verge of tipping over.

Luella Sander's desk on the other hand is immaculate and I sometimes feel that I am standing in an office exhibition in a furniture store when I wander in there.

Jow Panky's went to the same school of organizing that Keller Deal did and a second mail truck crashed in her office. Joy is older than Keller however so Joy's endless stack of papers are at least in organized stacks though no one understands the except Joy. It would likely take an excavation team several months to identify everything that is in there.

Skip Eloge's office is also immaculate but this is likely because he spends all of his time trying to master email and has no time to clutter his office with other things. Skip is setting the tone for a "green workplace" at Union Mission.

Going the other way, Jeanette's desk is organized and classical piano music seems to come from one of the drawers. Across the room, Donna has mulitple desks and seems to use them all at one time. This office has mastered the art of appearing both organized and unorganized at the same time!

Lauren Milmine's office seems sparse. I'm uncertain as to why this is as she also uses two desks at once and has other furniture in it but whenever I wander in, it is like Lauren is on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

And my office is, of course, perfect! Mainly because any piece of paper that comes my way I give to Keller, Skip, Lavanda, Joy, Luella, Jeannette, Lauren or Donna. That way it looks as though I am in complete control.

Collectively we are organized chaos. But then again, that is what this work is all about. People's lives fall out of control and a chaos takes over. They come to Union Mission and we work with them to bring order to the chaos so that lives have meaning again.

Yesterday I was at Dutch Town and found myself locked out of the community center. The staff had gone and no one trusts me with a key so I stood there pondering what to do when this elderly black man approached me. He told me that they had all gone to lunch.

I went to introduce myself but he already knew who I was. I asked him which unit was his and be proudly said "501".

He had come to us from the state prison where Union Mission has a pilot project for releases. That was three years ago when he entered the J. C. Lewis Health Center as a sick parolee.

From there he moved to Grace House and then Beyond Grace and now is one of the first tenants of Dutch Town, a brand new 48 unit apartment complex for chronically homeless people. Order had triumphed over chaos.

So I returned to the office and it took me a full five minutes to find Keller Deal under the stack of papers that she was working under. Once I did though, we started again bringing order to it all.