The Quiet Sainthood of Denie Tackett

I saw on the news that evening a tribute to one of the valley's largest churches. They feed on average the report said 200 or so people every Sunday. They have 150 volunteers to support the feed the homeless program. Mosaic ministries does 100-200 with 4 people that prepare the food and serve while they minister with a personal touch to many of them that go through the line. Their resources come from outside donation and personal sacrifice. Little is made much when God's hand is in it and he has such willing hearts to work with.  Mosaic Street

This snippet from a blog of my friend Denie Tackett in Boise, Idaho was written by a couple who had just visited her park outreach and saw upclose the quiet service of this woman I've known since before I was old enough to vote. Denie casually began walking through a city park near the college in Boise to purposefully intersect with the homeless, or "friends who live outside," as she and Ken Loyd prefer calling our homeless brothers and sisters.  She felt a call from the Holy Spirit to serve the city's poor, but after a disillusioned stint of service at a shelter (it's so institutional and cold, she said) Denie decided to just take to the streets herself. A rugged, independent woman who carries scars from her rough background, Denie is a fierce mamabear kind of woman who doesn't flinch in dark places. She looks for the lost ones there.

Me and Denie. I first met her when we were teenagers and living in Vegas.

The thing about Denie and others like her that I know such as Ken and also Dustin Cross of Seattle, WA, they each are just Being God's Presence to the most invisible citizens of their cities. The church cited above uses ten times the resources - both people and money - in attempts to accomplish what these three threadbare ministries do in a given week. It's like the difference between a giant concert hall or a small venue. Music is heard at both, but there is an intimacy in the smaller places that cannot be duplicated in a roaring arena of thousands. Denie is a small corner tavern where the best bluesmen come to play for love and nothing else and where everybody knows your name.  And indeed she does. I've spent an afternoon in the park with her, I've driven around with her in her truck looking for her friends who hang out under flyovers and in places like Beercan Alley. She is a shepherdess for the stray souls of Boise, but she refuses to a fault to pitch religion to them. The Gospel, she tells me, is best heard when I listen to them rather than them to me. She is the one hearing the Good News of God's love when she discovers another forgotten kind soul wayward in life but not in heart. "These people are some of the kindest people you'll ever meet," she says. But Denie's not naive or blind. She has stories of those who have lied to her, attempted to steal from her or have been sexually aggressive towards her. But she doesn't shy away from the mission she has embarked on. She cries, she prays, she rants, she gets going out the door again - after working five shifts a week in the stressful environment of a Boise hospital - and gives her life away to some of the most destitute in Idaho.

It's not glamorous. There will be no movie of the week made about Denie or the guys in the park as she affectionately refers to them. She has made herself one of the invisible but then she does what Ken Loyd refers to as magic tricks : she, like Ken, helps the invisible become visible to themselves just by paying attention. That is the good news of Jesus' love from my perspective. That is the miracle of human compassion transcending human frailty.