I am the worthless servant.

Friends,

I've been in an Ann Patchett phase lately. Not her novels (though, yes, those too), but her essays. She has this particular gift for finding the spiritual weight in ordinary encounters, and I've been reading her like someone who found a good thing and won't stop.

One essay I keep coming back to is called "The Worthless Servant." In it, she rides along with Charlie Strobel, a Nashville priest who has spent his entire adult life serving the homeless through Room in the Inn. At one point Charlie tells her about a passage from Luke in which a servant who does everything asked of him—and then joyfully does more—is called a "worthless servant." Not as an insult, but as a kind of spiritual aspiration. The worthlessness is the point. The servant has disappeared entirely into the work. It's a state of loving service so total, Patchett writes, that it becomes a kind of transcendence.

Patchett is clear that she isn't the one doing on-the-ground work alongside Charlie. But she is the one who can stand in front of a crowd and make an impassioned case for why the work deserves their support. She actually does exactly that, serving as a speaker at Room in the Inn's big fundraiser, gathering donors into a hotel ballroom over a continental breakfast and telling them face to face why this work is worth their continued generosity. I read that and felt it in my bones, because that impulse is mine too. If I could get all of you into a room somewhere—yes, with the eggs that are somehow simultaneously rubbery and too fluffy but still delicious—I would. I would talk your ear off.

But here's the thing about our little community: you are spread across many corners of this earth, which means this email will have to do. So consider this your hotel ballroom. Pull up a chair.

I'll confess something first. Like Ann Patchett, my role here is a peculiar one. My parents are the ones in the work, physically present and irreplaceable. My mom spends hours walking seamstresses through new patterns. My dad has spent countless hours teaching refugees how to drive. Our board members plan in-person events and show up with their families. Our volunteers are many, committed, and on the ground—cleaning homes for newly arrived families, building the kind of welcome that no organization can manufacture from a desk.

And me? I send the emails. I post to social media. I keep the website looking worthy of the work happening behind it. I plan the online fundraisers. There are days when sending an email or updating a website feels like a poor substitute for the real work happening all around me. But I am, in the Lukan sense, the worthless servant—perhaps not physically present in the hands-on labor, but caring about it deeply enough to lose myself in it anyway.

Which is exactly why I want to tell you what that labor looks like right now.

Here is what The Off Ramp does:

We have been building a small economy of dignity for artisans in vulnerable circumstances. Through Threads by Nomad, we market the work of craftspeople in Uganda, Southeast Asia, Kyrgyzstan, and here in the American South (in Charlotte and Raleigh) so that their skill has a market and their labor has worth. Some of this work involves mentoring: right now we are walking alongside two artisans in Uganda and two in Southeast Asia, and working with a group of five women seamstresses in Uganda through Sewing for Hope. In Kyrgyzstan, we have been helping in product development for an enterprise that employs vulnerable women. And in Uganda, we are supporting a basket weaving program for refugee women who deserve to be seen as artists.

We have been working to keep people safe. When Afghan refugee families in Islamabad faced an urgent need for shelter, we worked to secure it. We helped one Afghan family make a new life in New Zealand. We helped another family resettle here in the United States. These are not abstractions. These are people.

We have been building space for healing and mutual support. We run two Strengthening Families groups—one for Dari speakers and one for Spanish speakers—where women learn coping and parenting skills and find, maybe for the first time in a long time, a room full of people who understand what they are carrying.

We have been showing up in Houston, where board member Sairah and volunteer Alaya are walking with refugees through Interfaith Ministries, doing the kind of work that doesn't make headlines but changes lives.

And we maintain a furniture bank, because when a family finally has an apartment of their own, an empty room is not a home. Household goods matter. A table to eat at matters.

I am aware that I just handed you a list rather than a hotel breakfast. But I hope you can feel, underneath the bullet points, the weight of what each one represents.

We do have specific financial needs coming, and I'll be sharing those in July. It has been over a year since we've publicly asked for financial gifts, and this is not that ask. Not yet. This is just me, the worthless servant, stepping out from behind the laptop to say: this work is real, it is worth your attention, and I am grateful beyond measure that you are part of it.

More soon.

In gratitude,

Christen