Sermon transcript:
Good morning. It’s a gift to be with you today. I’m here because of the quiet ways God works through relationships and community. Over the past year, I’ve had the privilege of working alongside Amanda Kalbfleisch as Activa and Marillac Place explored and developed new housing possibilities for mothers and young children who are homeless here in Waterloo Region. That shared work opened doors to new connections: I met Roberta Hickey and Rev. Joe, and now find myself here with you this morning. I’m grateful for the chance to share a little about Marillac Place as well as my own story with you.
Marillac Place is the only 24/7 staffed transitional shelter in Waterloo Region specifically supporting women who are pregnant or parenting a child under two and experiencing homelessness, regardless of their age, race, or the circumstances that led them to homelessness. We work with women with mid-high acuity needs, offering trauma-informed residential care, life skills programming, and wraparound supports in a congregate living environment.
And yet, despite the reality we see every day, as of today, our region, our province, and our country still do not consistently count or track the number of children experiencing homelessness. These children remain largely invisible in our data and our policies. Their lives are not planned for, their needs are not named, and as a result, their futures are rarely invested in. Often, they only become visible once they enter larger systems like education or child protection.
But we know, from decades of research and from the experience of healthcare providers, educators, and child welfare workers, that the earliest years of life matter profoundly. Stable housing, safety, nutrition, early learning, and supportive relationships shape long-term outcomes across a lifetime. Those who work closest to children ages zero to five see this clearly. They see what happens when families have nowhere safe to go.
This is why our vision at Marillac Place reaches beyond shelter alone. We are working toward a fully integrated continuum of housing and supports, one that connects emergency and transitional housing with permanent housing, healthcare, early childhood supports, education, and child welfare. Not working in isolation, but alongside partners who already see the consequences when families fall through the gaps. Our hope is to meet families earlier, to support parents, to keep families together, and to offer children stability before the impact of living in a long-term crisis state becomes irreversible.
This is, at its heart, the same story Scripture has been telling all along. A God who does not wait until it is too late. A God who settles the solitary in a home. A God who protects children, not after harm has taken hold, but by creating refuge in the midst of vulnerability.
Psalm 68:5–6 tells us: Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God settles the solitary in a home…
When we care for children and their mothers, when we help build systems of safety and belonging, we are not stepping outside our faith. We are stepping directly into it.
Scripture tells us that God is a protector of children and a refuge for those without a home. This is not a side note in our faith or a theme reserved for special moments. It sits at the very center of who God is. A God who sees those who are vulnerable. A God who moves toward them. A God who longs to place people in homes, places of safety, dignity, and belonging.
Many of the families we walk alongside today are carrying burdens that are difficult to name out loud. Stories shaped by violence, loss, poverty, rejection, and displacement. These realities are often easy to miss as we pass by people in everyday life – on the sidewalk, in the grocery store, shopping for new winter boots. Especially because they are meant to be hidden. But they are never unseen by God.
When God chose to enter the world, He did not come through comfort or security. Jesus was not born in a home, not into privilege or safety, but into poverty, in a place where there was no room. And soon after His birth, Scripture tells us this: Matthew 2:13–15: Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt…
This moment tells us nearly everything Scripture offers about Jesus’ earliest life. His story begins with urgency and a warning in the night; His parents fled in the night to protect him from violence. As refugees in a foreign land, Mary and Joseph would have known what it meant to live quietly, to rely on the kindness of others, unsure where safety truly lay. Jesus’ early life was marked not by certainty, but by dependence.
That story matters, because it echoes forward.
All of the women who come to Marillac Place arrive pregnant or with a very young child in their arms. Some carry a single bag with what little they could gather; others arrive with nothing at all. What they share is a deep exhaustion, the kind that doesn’t always show on the surface, shaped by fear, uncertainty, and the long effort of trying to hold life together as options and hope slowly disappear. Each woman arrives with her own story. Some have lived with violence, others have been pushed out by poverty, rejection, displacement, or systems that were never designed to support them. Some are newcomers or refugees, navigating unfamiliar systems and unfamiliar language. What brings them to our door is not one reason, but a moment where there is nowhere left to turn, and a need for safety, for rest, and for a place where both they and their children can finally sleep without fear and begin, slowly, to take the next steps.
There is another reason this story lives so close to my heart.
I was a child who was loved by my parents, and I was also a child who was hurt by the brokenness and evil that exists in this world. Both of those things are true and for a long time, I didn’t know how to hold them together. I carried wounds that shaped my life in ways I didn’t yet have language for, and I learned early what it meant to survive, to adapt, and to keep moving forward even when things felt unsafe or uncertain.
By the time I was 18, I found myself in a place many of the women we now serve know well: I was pregnant, I hadn’t finished high school, I was scared, and I had no clear sense of what I was going to do next. What I did know was that I loved the child growing inside me, and that I needed help. I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have answers. I was doing the best I could with what I had, holding fear and love side by side.
In the years that followed, life was hard in ways that don’t fit neatly into a single story. I worked, I survived, and I kept going because I had to. But I didn’t heal, and I didn’t know God yet. I buried my wounds and my shame, and if I am being honest, that took a toll on not just me, but on my daughter and the people around me as well. There were long stretches where I just kept moving forward, not because I felt whole, but because stopping wasn’t an option. I imagine many of you know that place.
It wasn’t until my 30s that God came to meet me. Not all at once, and not with easy answers. God met me gently, patiently, and truthfully. He began to reshape my story, not by erasing what had happened, but by naming it, redeeming it, and refusing to let it define the rest of my life. My journey of faith didn’t begin with certainty or strength. It began with anger and brutal honesty, boldly questioning how a good God could exist alongside so much pain. If he loved me, why did he let me suffer?
Over time, I came to see God not as some distant figure, but as my creator and saviour, who knows me fully and loves me deeply. I began to understand that the brokenness I experienced was not something God caused, but something God grieved. That evil is real and it hurts real people, but it does not have the final word. And that somehow, in God’s timing and grace, He was committed to redeeming my life by shaping it into something that could serve others and help change a small piece of what remains broken in our world today.
Now, when I walk alongside women who arrive pregnant, uncertain, and afraid, I recognize something familiar. Not because our stories are the same, but because I know what it means to stand at the edge of your life and not know how it will unfold, only knowing that you love your child and you need help. It is humbling beyond words to realize that I now serve women whose shoes I once stood in, and that God invites me to surrender myself in the pursuit of creating places of safety, dignity, and possibility for others.
As I’ve shared today from Scripture, from Marillac Place, and from my own life, one thread keeps returning. God does not wait for things to be tidy, and God’s presence is often found in the midst of suffering and in vulnerable places, often long before life feels settled, and sometimes only after long seasons of waiting and struggle.
Scripture tells us: Matthew 18:5: Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me.
My hope is that we leave here today a little more aware of a truth Scripture has named for generations and lived experience continues to confirm. In uncertain times, our strength is not found in what we can secure or control, but in our shared capacity to notice, to care, to act, and to make room. This is the quiet, faithful work God is already doing among us, where ancient words meet present realities, restoring dignity and offering hope in places too often unseen.
— Julie Walder