Second Chances
By Krista Skiffington, Community Engagement & Volunteer Lead
"The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." — Lamentations 3:22-23
At Lighthouse Housing Alliance, we have a lot of experience with second chances. It's easy to say the words, but harder to live them out – to actually believe that a person who has fallen down, again and again, is still worth reaching for. I've learned that lesson from both sides: as a staff member who believes it about our clients, and as someone who has needed to believe it about myself.
When I interviewed here nine months ago, I marveled at how precisely the position fit. Every disparate job I'd held before, from Behavior Therapist to Administrative Assistant to bringing sandwiches to the homeless as a preschool teacher, seemed to have been preparing me for this one. But I didn't feel nearly as "aligned" in my personal life. I'd recently been terminated from another job and was struggling with an addiction that felt entirely out of my control. I was terrified of failing at work that mattered too much to mess up. Still, I took the leap, reluctantly trusting that only God could have orchestrated timing like this.
As the weeks went on, I noticed something else: my new boss, AnnaMaria, kept showing up in ways that mirrored exactly what Lighthouse asks of our mentors. She didn't hand me a set of instructions and walk away. She took me and my ideas seriously, even my habit of taking hula-hooping breaks in the parking lot, and built on them. She held me accountable without judging my mistakes. She was, in every sense, a Mentor before I understood what that word meant at Lighthouse.
That mirroring is, I think, the real subject of this story. Families come to Lighthouse already cost-burdened, often one crisis away from losing everything, and the world is quick to call them "too difficult." They start to believe the lies that come with that judgment: What's the use in trying? No one actually cares about you. You got yourself into this mess, so you don't deserve help. I know those lies. This past winter, I fell for a version of my own: You keep messing up. Your glory days are over. No one will ever understand you. You will never recover. And the more I believed them, the more the addiction took hold. I was late to work, paralyzed by overthinking, isolated from the people around me. Three sponsors in my 12-step program let me go, one after another, convinced I wasn't "ready" for change.
Lighthouse exists to interrupt that story, for clients and, it turns out, for the people who work here too. Our mentors climb into the boat and row alongside families, holding space for them without giving up, even when the family has stopped believing anyone will. That's exactly what happened for me. AnnaMaria didn't give up on me, even when I'd given up on myself. My church community — much like a Care Community we’d connect our clients to at Lighthouse - didn't abandon me, either. They stood firm and reminded me there was a way out, surrounding me with support I didn't know I needed.
It's a model built on the conviction that healing isn't linear, for the families we serve and for the staff who serve them. People stumble. They isolate. They convince themselves they're beyond help. What makes the difference isn't perfection; it's a community that doesn't disappear when things get hard, and that keeps extending a hand until someone is ready to take it. I needed someone outside myself to hold up the light before I could see it on my own. So it is with our program: we nudge families toward hope until they can see it for themselves, and we wait for them to decide when they're ready to walk toward it.
Today, God has given me tools to cope, and I lean on Him and a loving community every day, still surrendering the lies as they come. That's the heart of Lighthouse, not a program that fixes people, but a community that refuses to give up on them, whether they're the family we're serving or the person answering their emails.
None of us make it through this life without a helping hand somewhere along the way – without needing, at some point, a second chance. I'm no longer ashamed that I've needed mine as much as the families we serve need theirs. I'm grateful Lighthouse has gotten me there.
