[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]Meridith Owensby and I[.small-caps] met at the Open Door Catholic Worker in Atlanta in 2002. We were twenty years old. She was studying mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech; I was studying anthropology at Emory. The ministry sat between our campuses on Ponce de Leon Avenue. Every week we converged there at five in the morning to serve breakfast. Together we scooped grits and washed dishes.[.article__paragraph--cap]

At the Open Door we learned that God is a liberator, that the poor are the crucified Christ, and that our battle is not against flesh and blood but powers and principalities. We were regularly lambasted by Ed Loring, one of the founders, who told us to forget everything about Christianity we’d learned as children. We got to know men from the streets and women of the cloth. By our senior year, we had largely abandoned our formal academic pursuits in favor of reading Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton and imagining a kingdom where a tiny seed could grow into a tree large enough to shelter all the birds. In a time before text messages, our emails flew back and forth: “What do you think God wants for our lives?”

Over the next decade, we grew deeper into that shared commitment. Together, we worked for the Church of the Savior in Washington, DC; she in hospice, I in affordable housing. When I married Ben, Meridith helped write the liturgy for the wedding. When Ben and I had our first child, a daughter, Meridith was living with us in Cincinnati, holding our firstborn while we tried to sleep past six.

In 2012, I was pregnant with my second child when Meridith asked, “What if we started a Catholic Worker house, something like the Open Door?”

Fortunately, Ben is an architect; with him to help us survey dilapidated properties, we began saving money and calculating how a homeless shelter might be funded from our own modest earnings. We hosted a dinner at her church. A friend cooked Mediterranean food in honor of our chosen patron, Lydia of Thyatira. We raised $17,000 and, with our own savings, offered $40,000 on a stately mansion with white pillars that needed every imaginable renovation.

Just before closing on the house, Ben and I welcomed a son. On weekends, Ben led volunteer work crews. I nursed the baby. Meridith made lunch for the workers and entertained our toddler.

In 2014, we opened Lydia’s House.

On Sundays, and often on other days too, we all ate dinner together at the shelter. Meridith took the lead on guest care, accompanying women through childbirth, driving them to behavioral health appointments, and showing up for the emergencies I couldn’t tend to with children in tow. Our family, living just down the block, developed a square dance with her, handing off babies, crises, and the on-call phone.

Together we celebrated our shelter guests’ sobriety anniversaries, GED graduations, and children’s first birthdays. We also went to their court hearings, watched children removed from their parents, and had awkward conversations with volunteers and donors when they weren’t helpful or made the women we served uncomfortable. Many days we wondered if we were in too deep; often we said to each other, “This only works because you’re here.”

At first, we imagined Lydia’s House would be a three-year project. Then three became five, and five became seven, and now we are at fourteen. We learned early that it is better to extend a commitment than ­truncate one. Ours has simply kept extending until the horizon is now, likely, all the days of our lives.

My Catholicism takes a different shape than Meridith’s faith, formed by the Methodists and Brethren. Her more intense focus on our shelter guests is different from my vocation to marriage and family. Yet rather than drifting apart due to our differences, we have spent a quarter century cementing a friendship that is challenging, life-giving, and deeper than our culture prescribes. If we get three more decades together, I expect the pattern will hold, that we’ll be better versions of ourselves for a shared life of conversation, reevaluation, and action.

In our work with women experiencing homelessness, we see family showing up when all other ties have failed. If you have a mother or a sister who will take you in or provide childcare in a pinch, you are likely to avoid time in a shelter.

Meridith and I have become that family for each other, sisters in Christ. And as we’ve grown from friends to kin, we’ve also become that family for many of our guests. We have been asked to take their children into our homes, be with them during hospitalizations, and pick them up in times of crisis. The commitment we’ve made to each other has expanded beyond mutual love and care, like yeast leavening a loaf.

Jesus tells his disciples that where two or more are gathered in his name, he is there. I’ve wondered if he means that his spirit rises to fill the space between us. Our friendship is not just for our own delight, but a dance that draws people in. Well, actually only Meridith is a dancer; I definitely am not. Nonetheless, in the space between us a crowd has gathered.