Peace and contentment doesn’t come without some stress and struggle
White Rock woman impulsively left her real estate career to help homeless people
On a January night in 2004, Mary Anne Connor sat chilled in her little cottage in White Rock, haunted by the thought of homeless people shivering out on the snowy streets.
Over the previous year, she’d spent some Sundays at the Gentle Shepherd Church in Whalley — Surrey’s toughest and poorest neighbourhood.
The following morning, she went to the pastor and told him he had to open the church that night to shelter the homeless. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the keys, and said he would do it on one condition: she would be in charge. And then he dropped the keys in her hand.
“I was terrified. I couldn’t back down and I couldn’t say I was terrified ... so I cried,” says Connor, who is founder and president of Night-Shift Ministries, which runs a thrift shop and mobile soup kitchen and provides counselling services, street- level nursing and, soon, basic dental care.
It’s not like Connor didn’t have anything else to do. She ran a successful real- estate marketing company and was supposed to be preparing for a big presentation at the International Homebuilders Association convention the following week in Las Vegas.
But she went home, called up everyone she knew and asked for everything she thought she needed — blankets, pillows, socks, coats, boots, coffee, bread and peanut butter for sandwiches.
When she opened the door that night, donors started arriving with the stuff and homeless people shuffled in — wet, cold and sick.
“I met 35 people who were struggling in various states of poverty, addiction and mental health and for a week I stayed up with them as they slept on the floor ...
“I saw women curled up on the floor like babies with their teddy bears and what I saw on their faces was contentment and that broke my heart because I realized it could have been me or it could have been any one of my girls. And I realized I wasn’t any different. It caused a shift in my heart.”
Connor — who has two daughters, a son and three grandchildren — barely slept the following few days; she was too busy scrounging for things during the day and making coffee and sandwiches and praying over the sleeping people at night.
She cancelled her presentation, even though it was the opportunity of a lifetime to boost her career and her company’s reputation. Connor told the organizers she no longer had anything to say about selling or marketing real estate. The only message she had for the corporate leaders is that they ought to be giving more back to the community.
A few weeks later, Connor shut down her company even though she had only modest savings — RSPs that she blew through in the next three years as Night-Shift got established.
“I was impacted by the pain I was experiencing in my own life. Having my eyes opened to other people struggling with pain similar to what I had experienced, I realized I had to do something to bridge that gap. And as I reached out, our hearts connected and then my heart broke and then compassion moved me forward.”
A difficult upbringing
Connor’s father died when she was 14, leaving her mother to raise five kids alone in Halifax. Two years after her father died, Connor was pregnant and married.
A decade later, after three months in hospital, Connor lost a third child in her seventh month of pregnancy. Exactly a year later, in 1978, her husband, Andy, was murdered in Grand Cache, Alta., on a fishing trip with two friends. He was killed by a stranger — another fisherman who had camped nearby and shot Andy twice after having accused the trio of stealing his cooler.
“He was my first love and I’m still in love with him,” says Connor, who was at home in Nova Scotia with their eight- year- old daughter and year- old son. “I was 6,000 kilometres away. I’d never been out of Nova Scotia. I had two babies, no money and ( Andy had) no life insurance.”
Connor started a modelling and talent agency and married again a few years later. She had another daughter. She struggled with an addiction to drugs prescribed to cope with migraines. With the marriage deteriorating, her husband moved to Vancouver and asked Connor to come for a 10- day visit in 1986 to see if they could patch things up. They didn’t.
But on that visit, she went to church and, she says, God entered her life.
Connor went back to Nova Scotia, sold the house, packed up the kids and moved. She got her real- estate licence and got to work. She married again, although that marriage foundered in 1999.
Searching for some sort of peace, Connor rented a series of rundown, ocean-view cottages in White Rock. On Sundays, she tried out different churches hoping to hear a message that soothed her.
Gentle Shepherd Church did the opposite. The people there repelled and frightened her. She didn’t want to touch them, because they seemed so different from her. When she finally did hold the hand of a homeless person, Connor says, “It was like holding a pineapple, but I also somehow thought that maybe that’s what it might be like to hold the hand of an angel.”
“I struggled all my life with my fear of not having enough ... That was the basis of how I lived my life and I always thought that I had to strive to make money, which I did exceptionally well. And when I shifted from my business into ministry, it wasn’t about the money. It was the freedom attached with letting go of that fear and that drive to make money.”
‘ Whole- hearted’ ambitions
Connor is what Brené Brown calls a “whole- hearted” person.
Brown, a research professor in the University of Houston’s school of social work, has spent years trying to figure out what makes happy people different from others. What she’s concluded is that they are not only “willing to let go of who they should be to be who they are,” they have found a way to live with vulnerability. And, as importantly, she says, they are willing to give to others with no guarantee that gratitude will be returned.
Nine years on, Night-Shift has grown. From its mobile kitchen, it serves 75 to 150 meals every night. It collects and distributes clothing, runs a thrift shop, offers counselling and has nearly 400 active and trained volunteers.
Connor has also grown. She’s now an ordained minister in the Foursquare Church and a licensed counsellor.
Connor admits her all- or- nothing quest for meaning isn’t for everyone. But for people thinking about taking the leap, her advice is simple. “Stop navel gazing. Stop focusing on ‘ It’s about me’ or ‘ It’s about my pain’ or ‘ It’s about my life.’ Look beyond yourself to see what other need is out there.”
But she says you can also find happiness simply by being nicer, by smiling at strangers or talking to someone in a bank lineup.
It’s advice that’s been tested and found true by academics who measured people’s happiness levels and then challenged them to talk to strangers in elevators for a week. By week’s end, their happiness score was up substantially.
Of course, happiness doesn’t mean bliss 24/ 7.
“It’s not that I don’t have stress. The stress is way beyond what I had before because in business if I needed $ 50,000 I could make it. But I’ve had to let that go and let God take care of things,” says Connor.
“But I’m more than happy. I’m content. I’m at peace.”