...and we knew God had stayed.

I dreamed of rain.
Thick, heavy rain that made the gutters weep.
Rain that smelled of fir trees and forgiveness.
Rain that didn’t ask who was worthy.

It fell through holes in the ceilings of shelters,
slid down the faces of people waiting in line for soup,
washed the dust from a sleeping bag in the alley.

A woman caught it in her mouth.
A man lifted his palms to the sky and sobbed,
simply from being touched.

Hope was in the wind,
messing up our hair without apologizing.

I dreamed of God standing in the rain too,
barefoot, soaked,
sighing into the mouths of the thirsty.

And we knew God had stayed.

I dreamed of the years eaten alive by grief.
Years that didn’t produce anything;
not love, not courage, not even sleep.
Just numbness,
and the throb of surviving.

In the dream,
God gathered those years like dead birds
from below soulless skyscrapers,
laid them gently on the altar,
brushed dirt from their wings,
and blew into them.

The wings twitched.
The eyes opened.
Nothing is wasted, God said.
Not even the days you couldn’t get out of bed.
Every broken thing will be compost.
Even the years you buried yourself.

And we knew God had stayed.

I dreamed of soup pots.
Big metal ones,
dented by the saints.
Hands stirring, stirring, stirring…
spoons scraping grief off the bottom.
The smell of garlic and longing.

A man with missing teeth said,
Next week, I’ll help bake.
Laughter shook the room.
No one left hungry.
Just a sing-song of I’ll see you next week.
You bet. You bet.

And God sat in the back,
feet up,
eating pickles and Timbits,
strumming on an old guitar
and nodding:
Yes. This is what I meant.

And we knew God had stayed.

I dreamed the food bank closed its doors.

We didn’t run out of food,
We just ran out of hunger.
No one had to choose between rent and dinner anymore.
And justice finally kept the promise
that charity was never meant to carry alone.

The question was no longer,
How will I eat?
but, Whom shall I invite to dinner?

I dreamed the line didn’t disappear,
it just became a circle.
People stayed.
But they came to create.
To dance.
To check on each other.
To sit shoulder to shoulder
and feel what it is to belong.

I dreamed of a government that stopped pretending not to see.
One that didn’t call poverty a moral failure.
One that didn’t shrug while people
froze on park benches beside luxury condos,
whose board is suing the sanctuary next door.

And we knew God had stayed.

I dreamed of shame
walking itself to the river
and drowning.

Spirit crawling into cracks and crawlspaces,
kissing the bruised foreheads of the unclaimed.

Pouring itself
into the veins of the desperate,
and the lungs of the dying.

Old women dreamed again.
Children spoke languages of love
no one had yet taught them.
The sky split open like a woman in labour
and mercy spilled out screaming.

And we knew God had stayed.

I dreamed of prophets rising
from park benches and encampments.
Of their cardboard signs
turning into scripture everybody had memorized.

Of filthy holy beings blessing the bread
at the edge of the city,
fracturing it with their own bleeding hands.

God whispered to each of them:
Even you. Especially you.
Here.
Now.

And the city quaked
under the weight
of that goodness and mercy
chasing all of us down.

And we knew God had stayed.

I dreamed of rain again.
This time, it didn’t stop.

It poured through Parliament and prisons,
into courtrooms and safe consumption sites,
over the graves of the forgotten.

The rain made everything holy again.
It erased the lines between sacred and ordinary.
It touched the places we forgot were still alive.
It softened what had been hard too long.
It ran through the cracks in our doubt,
gathered in the bowls of our hands,
and we drank like people who had been waiting forever.

We gulped,
and in the years the locusts ate
we might have been embarrassed,
but it was just the sound of dry things saying yes.

And we knew God had stayed. 🦢