Breaking Bread with Toni

A broken woman; that’s what comes to mind when I think back to seeing Toni that first time.  My work at the university gave me the opportunity to hire “work-study” students to get more work done.  The federally funded program provided financially challenged students with funding for us to hire them, making it a bargain for us.  Wisely or unwisely, I felt that I could always use another good student worker; there was always more we could do.  

Toni came to the door at the beginning of a summer term, when our other fresher, younger work-study students had gone home to their full-time jobs.  She seemed so worn out that she she barely had the energy to smile.  Perhaps it was contrast that moved my heart; perhaps it was just the lack of other students.  I hired her on the spot and told her she could start the next day.  It was one of the best hiring decisions I’ve ever made.  

Toni was worn but wise, entering not from High School, but almost literally from the streets.  Homeless after the death of her father, she had done what she had to do to survive, and had gone to prison for it, finishing high school equivalency there and returning to the streets to help those in her situation.  Her good work was recognized by an agency serving female ex-offenders, and they sent her to the university to earn the degree she’d need for professional certification. 

Like the woman in “A Mother Theresa Story” (click for a link) who shared what little she had been given, Toni had, from the start, shared what little she received.  She talked about her “kids” though she had never given birth to one.  They were young women and girls she’d pick up off the street and bring home, to the place she could just barely afford as an entry-level caseworker, or an “outreach” worker, driving the streets trying to save them.  She would talk about her “brother” though her family had abandoned her decades ago, the man who she took in, who helps her guide her son, who she adopted because she couldn’t bear having another foster child moved to another family, or “aged-out” of the system at 18. 

I was befuddled by the way Toni, who lived in poverty, so easily took people in, shared what little she had.  As she worked with me that summer, I realized that she came in every day already spent by her life on the margins, giving all that she could muster from what was left of her, drawing up from a reserve I eventually came to discover was her faith.  Every morning, we’d sit down together and review what needed to be done that day.  I’d put on a pot of coffee and pick up a fresh loaf of Ciabatta, simple, coarse, nourishing bread that Kathy and I had discovered while visiting our son in Spain.  Unequipped with silverware and plates, we’d break off chunks of the loaf and enjoy it with our coffee, sitting across the table in my office.  Toni, in her life of faith, referred to it as “breaking bread”.  

And there at table, in the same thirty minutes that it would take to celebrate Catholic Mass, I came to realize that Toni was like that bread that we broke.  My first impression of her had been right.  She was broken.  But as I came to know her more and more like a sister over the years until she graduated, she helped understand that she had been taken from the streets by a loving God, blessed by His Spirit within herself and within those who saw value in her there on the margins that “decent” people never see except in quick glimpses as we flee to comfort and safety.  And I came to know that she was indeed shared.  For the years she worked with us, she mothered the younger work-studies, challenged and inspired the groups of incoming freshmen who would go briefly out into the streets that were her turf.  The year before I retired, Toni graduated.  17 of her “kids” came to cheer for her.  

She continues, health worn by life on the streets, to save others from it, to take them in their brokenness as they are, by blessing them with a sense of their value, by sharing what little she has with them, and by sharing all that she is with them, as she did with me.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.