Rehab.

“There’s no way I’m moving there.” This was all Kelly said the first time she saw the place that would affectionately be known as 607. 

We'd moved to Baltimore to plant churches, and the economics of that decision were simple: our household income was effectively zero. Kelly stayed home with our six kids because we were committed to homeschooling, a choice that was tied to our being available to move into the inner city in the first place. I gave what little support I’d raised directly to the church. We leased a rowhome in the Patterson Park nieghborhood our first year, a missionary partner covering the rent, and tried to figure out how to make it work.

By year two we knew we needed to buy a house, rather than continuing to pay outrageous rent prices. Our church, though it was growing, was made up primarily of people who didn't have much either. When we finally found a house we could afford and submitted the loan, despite receiving initial approval, the underwriter refused to close. Now desperate, I found a small rowhome in a struggling neighborhood with a gracious landlord willing to offer a rent-to-own agreement. When I took Kelly to see it, she flatly refused even to consider the place. It had spent the previous twenty years as a Section 8 rental, and it looked like it. Somehow, the neighborhood seemed even rougher than the house. We could take it or leave Baltimore behind.

A week later, we moved in, the place on Lehigh Street.

When we first saw the 800-square-foot city rowhome, there were clearly more than a few details that needed attention. The drop ceiling was stained by years of cigarette (and likely other types of) smoke. The finish was worn off the original hundred-year-old wood floors. The kitchen was half there, and half not. The joists sagged in the middle. The plaster was cracked and crumbling off the double-brick walls in places. There were signs of a significant flood in the basement. It wasn't pretty, but it was ours, and having grown up in a culture where men were expected to know how to do pretty much anything around the house, and in the home of a father who did, I’d learned, however crudely, a few skills. Additionally, I was bold enough to think that, over time, I could handle the issues that were apparent and on the surface.

Sometimes confidence leads us into beautiful places we never imagined possible. Sometimes it leads us into disasters we were never prepared to bear. The difference between courage and foolishness often becomes clear only in hindsight, and the rowhome would prove to be a little bit of both.

The first project was the floors; there was no other real choice. We quickly established a rule in 607 that our kids, unless they were in bed, were required to wear shoes. On more than one occasion, I had to extract, through screams and violent threats, a massive splinter from the bare foot of one of our little ones. The floors were so worn that a trip down the stairs and into the kitchen was almost guaranteed to see a large sliver of century-old red oak inserted deep into a young foot. Kelly and I ordered hardwoods from a wholesaler in Dalton, GA, the flooring capital of the world.

On delivery day, the large truck tried to squeeze through the desperately narrow streets of our neighborhood, but soon realized it wasn’t possible. The driver parked three blocks away on a larger street, blocking traffic, and he and I carried the boxes of flooring, one at a time and to a chorus of curses and car horns, from the truck to our rowhome. With the boxes occupying the center of our living room, I set out installing the new hardwoods.

I’d done this before, so I felt generally comfortable using a pneumatic nailer and a mitre saw, and very soon, I had the main floor living room and dining area completed. Except for the small kitchen in the back, this was the entire first floor. The second floor went just as smoothly until I began working in the back bedroom. This room hung out about four feet over our back pad—in Baltimore, most rowhomes have no property except a back fenced-in concrete pad that’s about 15 feet wide and 30 feet long. Outside the back wall of our house, a narrow stairwell descended to a rear basement entrance. The bedroom hung out over these stairs, and given the decades the large oak cantilevers had been required to bear the weight of a portion of the room, they’d begun to sag. Significantly. It had been apparent, beneath the nasty, shaggy carpet, that the floor was bowed. However, now with the carpet removed, and with the original flooring revealed as splintering from the tension, the severity of the sag was even more apparent.

I stopped my work, called in a contractor, and received an estimate for repairing the cantilevered supports and for installing jack supports. One was outrageous. The other was reasonable. Neither was financially feasible. So I installed new sub-flooring over the original floors, leveling at the rear. The steps to the second floor were so narrow that carrying up the sheets of plywood was next to impossible. In fact, when we moved in, Kelly and I weren’t able to fit our old king-size spring mattress upstairs, so we threw it on the back pad and called for bulk trash pickup. Kelly and I slept on the floor for a year until we could afford a new foam mattress that came compressed into a small box. With the new, mostly-level sub-flooring in place, I installed beautiful new floors. The room’s root issue was still there, and even though not optimal, we were confident the room would remain stable for another hundred years. More importantly, our kids could walk barefoot throughout the house, and they’d never felt more free.

We moved into 607 in December 2015. Six weeks later, Snowzilla hit the city—the single largest snowstorm in Baltimore's recorded history. The accumulation was thirty-five inches, and after two days of nonstop precipitation, I stepped onto our front stoop to find my SUV buried beneath a mound of snow. The winds had piled it so high that it covered the hood and windshield, and only the roof was exposed.

The mayor declared all city streets officially closed for the week. Personally, I loved the idea. I pictured building snow forts, my German Shepherd bounding after a thrown ball, my kids red-faced and laughing. Our undocumented neighbors saw it differently. Most worked construction. No work meant no pay, and for families already stretched thin, a week without income wasn't a snow day. It was a crisis.

In the two months since we'd moved in, I'd come to know Leo as well as anyone on our street. He'd immigrated more than ten years before, leaving his wife and kids in Mexico while he worked to build something better for them. Every year, he talked about bringing them up. Every year they didn't come. At some point there was a new girlfriend staying with him. When I asked, he told me quietly that he and his wife had divorced.

I had an idea and asked Leo what he thought. We'd clear a car-sized space in front of the first vehicle in line, move it out to the cross street, then work our way back from there. 48 houses, roughly 48 cars, parked end to end. It was going to take a while. Leo and I started shoveling, throwing snow onto the sidewalk. We knocked on the door of the first car's owner, he pulled forward into the cleared space, then grabbed a shovel and joined us. As the pile on the sidewalk climbed toward ten feet, we carved walking paths to each front door. One space cleared, then another, then another, each car shuffling forward one position. Within a few hours we had maybe thirty neighbors working alongside us, and by the end of the day every car on Lehigh Street was free.

We stood in the street afterward, heaving, passing around waters and Gatorades. Leo turned to me, his accent thick, and his voice loud enough for everyone to hear: "Yeff, you are our leeder." People clapped. A few lifted their bottles. I received it—and I didn't. I've spent my whole life caught somewhere between confidence and doubt, never quite sure which one is telling the truth. Standing in the middle of Lehigh with thirty neighbors and a cleared block, I still couldn't say.

It was April, and the snow turned to rain. The back concrete pad was designed such that the slope would divert rainwater into the alley, which would then flow into sewage drains. Additionally, the flat roof was pitched toward the rear, and the gutter on the back was attached to an above-ground PVC pipe that dumped water into the alley. The pipe, however, was crumbling, and the concrete pad, through decades of settling, was cracked and did a very poor job of carrying the water away.

During the first significant rain, we noticed a little water in the basement. We cleaned it up, and didn’t think much about it. We were naive. It wouldn’t be long before a much heavier rain came, and we’d find water covering our entire basement floor. When I opened the rear exterior door, I found the stairwell holding inches of water. From a crack in the concrete retainer wall was a steady stream of water. The rain had entered through cracks in our back pad and absorbed into the ground. The dirt had become saturated to the point that hundreds of gallons leaked into the stairwell until it overflowed the threshold and, under the basement door, poured into our house.

We bought a small portable sump pump, and every time it rained, we’d put it in the stairwell and plug it up. It worked. But we knew it wasn’t a true solution. I went to a local hardware store and bought a tube of polyurethane masonry caulk. I used it to fill the cracks, and learned there were more and larger cracks than I’d realized. So I bought more. The next time it rained, the leaks were slowed, but not stopped. So I removed the caulk, bought hydraulic cement, and re-filled the cracks. This was an improvement, but still, water was coming in. So I removed the cement, and installed professional grade epoxy crack sealer. I should have done this in the first place, but I’d never dealt with this kind of issue, and my ignorance was on full display as I was in the place of depending on the advice of store attendants, who, looking back, probably didn’t know too much more than I did.

With the cracks now properly sealed, we had no need for the sump pump, and we experienced a couple of sublime water-free years. But beneath the surface—literally—trouble was brewing. I’d repaired the cracks in the rear stairwell, but there were other cracks that hadn’t been addressed. One day I stepped onto our back pad to find that a significant portion had collapsed. I’d kept the water out of our house, but I hadn’t kept it out of the ground, and rather than draining into the alley, it absorbed into the dirt, creating a large sinkhole. We further broke up the collapsed concrete, and used it, along with more gravel and dirt than I thought it would require, to fill the hole. We poured new concrete, repaired the remaining cracks, and could now feel confident the water issue had finally, after a years-long process, been solved.

When the water had first come in, we had to pull up the carpet we’d installed, along with removing the drumset we kept in the basement room where four of our kids practiced every day. With the water issue behind us, the drumset went back in. We lived with a continual low-level anxiety that our neighbors might complain about the drums. The sounds of guitars, and piano, and singing that floated through our windows and walls weren’t an issue, we were sure. But the drums were louder and sharper. So we worried. However, in our years at 607, we never received even one complaint, and we came to understand that our Spanish-speaking neighbors who lived on either side of us received our sounds in much the same spirit as we received the spicy smells that came to us from their fresh-cooked meals.

One of the most needed renovations was the ceiling. I don’t know when drop-ceilings came into fashion, but whether ours was original or installed years later, the compressed fiber tiles had plenty of time to absorb layer upon layer of smoke, resulting in a single house-sized yellow-brown stain and an accompanying odor that was impossible to overcome. With other projects behind us, we decided to do the work of tearing out the ceiling and installing new drywall. Though this wasn’t necessarily the biggest project, it was the most intimidating for me. I’d done my fair share of drywall, but I’d never done more than a small patch-job on a ceiling, and I knew this was going to be not only messy, but I wasn’t totally sure I could make it look anywhere near professional. I finally landed on this; no matter how it turned out, it couldn’t be worse than our current state of ceiling affairs.

With crowbar in gloved hands, I shoved the metal through the first fiber square and ripped downward. The tile came loose from the structural track, and with it, a cloud of half-rotted dusty debris. It covered my face, and because I hadn’t had the foresight to wear a mask, I breathed in a kind of air that was more stale than I understood, and with it, the molecules of whatever had been resting on top of the tiles. Upon further inspection, I learned that the dust was in fact a rat’s nest that hadn’t been warmed by its occupant in maybe a hundred years.

I wiped my face, put on a mask and protective goggles and got back to work. By the time I removed the entire drop ceiling, I’d discovered no fewer than 10 nests, and more than half of them contained the bones of the animals that had built them. With humans occupying the rooms below, atop the half-inch fiber tiles were families of a different kind trying to make their way within the Baltimore reality. Over the course of weeks, we installed a new drywall ceiling, including hiring some neighbors who did construction to help with the finish details. The house looked, and smelled, great.

When we purchased 607, in our kitchen, a stove, sink, and fridge were present. But there was no hood, no pantry, and the cabinets were either mismatched, or not there. Plus, there was a very large hole, I’m talking 12 inches by 30 inches, in the wood floor, which, though it had been covered by multiple layers of laminate flooring, had never actually been repaired. We learned not to step on that spot. The fridge was half-sized and had to be at least 80 years old. Honestly, I have no idea how old it was, and though it wouldn’t come close to holding food for a family of eight, it was very cold. Kelly and I saved aggressively for months, and bought new cabinets. With the help of one of our partner churches, who gave us a gift card to Home Depot for new appliances, we turned what was dilapidated into the kitchen of dreams.

The plaster throughout the house hadn’t aged well, so we installed furring strips over the existing plaster and attached new drywall throughout. On the largest main-floor wall adjacent to the front door, we removed the plaster and exposed the original double brick wall. This left a cloud of dust that not only left our hair and hands feeling chalky, but further hung in the air, settling slowly on every object within the house, for weeks. When we moved in, the bathroom had a terrible layout. The toilet seat was literally less than an inch from the tub, and when anyone sat down, they had to scoot to the left until they were uncomfortably off-center. We ripped out the bathroom, replumbed the entire thing, and finished the bathroom with absolutely gorgeous materials. I built a custom vanity, with wood from an old building that had been torn down, that was just the right size to fit the space. While installing the shower curtain rod, which required that I drill small holes in the tile, because I wasn’t patient enough, I accidentally made a tiny crack. Because of the tile’s texture, it wasn’t visible, but I knew it was there. It bothered me every time I took a shower.

The skylight leaked, so we replaced it. The roof leaked, so we installed a new one. And when all was said and done, through much frustration and pain—did I mention that, while installing the floors, I shot a finishing nail into the bone of my finger, and when I couldn’t pull it out, I desperately demanded that my 12-year-old son, who was helping me, yank it out?—607 had become warm and alive.

Aesthetic beauty is certainly significant. However, it is not the greatest good, and within the narrow rooms of our city rowhome, beauties far more profound were cultivated and shared. Our neighbor directly across the street, Rose, had lived in the neighborhood her entire life, and to say that she faced struggles doesn’t begin to capture the full spectrum of her reality. Rose struggled to cobble together the things she and her two daughters needed to live another day, and most nights we would see her out our front window walking up and down the sidewalks looking for loose change or cigarettes in the small spaces between parallel-parked cars and the curbs.

Rose’s younger daughter, Kari, was born with many of the normal challenges kids born to addicted mothers face, and she struggled in layered ways—academically, socially, physically, and otherwise. Rose never visited the church gatherings we held in our home, but Kari came most weeks. She appreciated the hot, fresh meals, and even more, the care she felt from my kids. Rose’s home indicated that she was legitimately a hoarder, and the house was far from clean. Kari too. Kelly and I took care of the pets on more than one occasion when Rose was in the hospital or at an inpatient mental health facility.

Kari would sometimes stay with us. The result, bedbugs infested our daughter’s bedroom where Kari slept. When we couldn’t get rid of them, in anger and desperation, I opened the back bedroom window, and chopping to pieces small enough to fit through, I sobbed as I tossed my kid’s furniture and books and stuffed animals onto the back pad. The pile was high, and though no longer safely contained in our house, my kids’ things were still with us. I thought of trying one more time to save the stuffed animals. The next step of sending it all to the dump wasn’t easy because it was final. But every time I saw the pile, I felt a surge of anger begin to rise in my throat. So, in less than 24 hours, I made a call to our junk guy, and he hauled it off. All this was the price for helping Kari feel loved. And it was worth it.

At one of our Sunday evening house-church gatherings, a man, Richard, who’d been with us for only a few weeks, became visibly upset. He’d often show up early to 607, 30 minutes or more before we’d officially begin, to play our old piano. He knew a few songs that our family and leaders knew, and we’d sing along. It was clear from the first time we met him that Richard was unstable—economically, and emotionally. On the night in question, I shared something to the effect that, because Israel rebelled against God, they faced judgment. Given Richard was pro-America, and pro-Israel, he took offense, and in the middle of my sermon, he expressed his great displeasure at the ideas I’d shared, declaring emphatically that God loved Israel. I agreed, then went on with my sermon. All the while, Richard rocked forward and backward, mumbling to himself, seeking to contain whatever was roiling inside him that was seeking escape.

Suddenly, when he could no longer restrain what was inside, he burst forth with the message, sweeping his pointed first finger around the room and at all in attendance, “You’re all going to die.” He said it, at first, matter of factly, with possessed eyes and gravel in his voice. He repeated the phrase over and over, each time, with greater intensity and volume. Then he stood up, swung open the front door, and rushed to his white van, which was parked on the street in front of our house. He violently slid back the side door, pulled out a large duffle bag, and began rummaging through. In a desperate rush, I locked the front door, including the deadbolt, and yelled for everyone to go to our basement. There was a small window just above ground level that looked out onto the front sidewalk, and I was confident it was small enough that Richard couldn’t get through. He tried to open the front door, and eventually went away. I don’t know what he was searching for in his bag, and I never saw him again. Hopefully, in some small way, he remembers being accepted and cared for during his short time with us.

One of our neighbors was named Rambo. I don’t know if that was his real name. Either way, every time I met him on the sidewalk, he was drunk in a way that seemed more like a caricature than reality. On many occasions, he spoke to my kids, especially my daughters, in ways that made them uncomfortable. The neighbors all said he was harmless. Given what I knew, I wasn’t so sure.

It was on the stoop at 607 where our neighbor, Nico, was robbed at gunpoint by two violent, masked assailants. While parked on the street, the window was shot out of my Toyota pickup. Once, rats chewed through the wiring of my wife's van, which led to an expensive electrical repair. Our cars were hit by careless drivers at least twelve times.

Money was tight in those years. Feeding eight people on what we had required exercising a kind of discipline we didn't always want, and sharing meals with neighbors, which we did regularly, meant that some weeks we ran low before the week ran out. On many occasions, we invited people from our church who had nowhere to sleep to use our basement or living room. We offered a space that was safe and warm, more than some had experienced in months, maybe years. At the same time, on those nights, I struggled to rest at all. With people I didn’t know sleeping below, I wrestled with thoughts about what they might do in the dark. I didn't doubt the decisions. I just struggled to rest in a house with doors open so wide.

Our dining area was very small, so we had a table built that was just the right size to fit the space and still seat our family of eight. Kelly's and my bedroom was incredibly tight, so I built a bed to hold our king-size mattress—the one that arrived in a box—with no margin on any side, taking up only as much space as was absolutely necessary. Two homes removed, we still sleep in this bed. In the bedroom, on the sofa, at the dining table, I wrote hundreds of Bible studies that have been used by churches nationwide to help young believers grow in their faith. During our years at 607, we received Dejah, our adoptive daughter, into our family. With our church, we sang songs, studied the Bible, and shared meals. With our family, we did the same, and so much more.

One morning when I was out meeting neighbors, I stepped to a house near the end of our block and was confronted by a sign inside a storm door window. It was printed on cardstock and taped to the glass seemingly years, maybe decades, earlier. When I saw it, a part of me wanted to laugh, and another part knew I shouldn't. Standing at the foot of the stoop, I was face to face with an image of a nearly life-sized chihuahua bearing its teeth at me, and with a pair of testicles that belonged on a rottweiler. I knocked.

A young lady named Kim answered. She was wearing clothes she'd clearly slept in. Her words, like her face, were low and long. After an exchange of brief pleasantries, she shared that she'd been in the neighborhood for only a few months, renting a room, like so many others in Baltimore, for a nominal amount from the gentleman who owned the house. Kim had deep needs, and pride didn't keep her from openly sharing. Over the years, after our church's family meals, when we had leftovers, we'd often deliver them beyond the chihuahua and into Kim's grateful hands.

After a brief moment with Kim, the owner stepped behind her, listened for a moment, then stepped in front. He was in his fifties, large but not as strong as he once was. He wanted to know who I was. I told him we'd recently moved in down the block, and having lived in the city his entire life, he identified me immediately as an outsider. We talked for a few minutes, and it didn’t take long for the hard layer to peel back.

I'd learned early that remembering a name was one of the simplest ways to honor someone. Because he was a big man, I rehearsed it on the walk home. Big Ben. Big Ben. I was still learning to be a preacher then—still the shy kid from Alabama who'd needed years before he could stand in front of a crowd without his hands shaking, still more comfortable with a guitar than a pulpit. I wasn't sure the title fit. But Baltimore didn't know that yet.

A few days later, I saw Ben walking toward the corner store, legs swollen, moving slowly one step at a time. As I approached him on the sidewalk, I said, "Hey, Ben." He looked up, immediately brighter. He stopped. After a pause, he said, "Hey, Preacher," the word coming out low and certain. He was simply saying what he saw.

He never called me anything else. For five years, it was always Preacher. On his way to the store. Coming back. Sitting on his stoop in the heat. Hey, Preacher. The first time, it had caught me off guard. Over time, though, it became ordinary. And that was the greater gift—not the surprise of being called Preacher, but the years of it. Sometimes, when we hear something enough, we begin to believe it.

In Alabama, when people would make improvements to spaces that had become worn from age or neglect, we used the language of renovation. We learned a different word in Baltimore. To improve a home was to perform a rehab. Given the nature of Baltimore, this language seems more fitting.

607 was built to be a place that housed love and where beautiful memories were born out of the experiences there. It witnessed countless children laughing as they ran up and down the sidewalks out front. It saw countless new cars parked on the street as drivers looked on in pride. Within its walls, 607 witnessed meals, and love, shared and savored. New brides were carried across its threshold, and new babies were brought home from the hospital. It also witnessed pain, grief, and tragedy. This is the natural economy of the human life.

Over the years, 607 had fallen into something much different than what it was at the beginning. And after years of descent, someone came along who envisioned something different. Whether bold visionary or naive fool, no one knows. Either way, a rehab was in order. What 607 became was something finer than what it was, even at the start.

Our rowhome was only 800 square feet, but our power bill was that of a house much larger. We suspected the reason was the front window. Essentially every Baltimore rowhome has a huge front window that looks out onto the sidewalk. Ours was not only drafty, but every day it remained in place was something of a minor miracle. It was held together by layers of paint and varied types of tape. One of our last projects was to replace the window. I measured once, then again, and placed an order for a custom-sized window, which was about 16 inches shorter than the original window.

Early in our marriage, as a gift, I bought, through Ebay, a stained-glass window as a gift for my wife. Shipping was more than I’d expected; when I bought it, I didn’t realize the window had been pulled from a cottage in the UK and would ship overseas. Whatever the case, Kelly loved it, and this set in motion a trend that has come to significantly shape the spaces where we’ve lived. We currently have dozens of stained glass windows hung throughout our house, and on certain occasions, we’ve gone to great trouble to procure some spectacularly gorgeous pieces of wood and glass.

Early in our time in 607, Kelly was perusing a local online market when she came across a listing announcing an old church would soon be torn down, and that its windows would be sold before demolition. The more elaborate windows were as spectacularly expensive as they were spectacularly gorgeous, but there were a few smaller windows that were reasonably within our budget. We bought two.

They happened to be exactly the right width to fit our front window, and for years, we talked and dreamed of installing the nicer of the two. Years later, I still hadn’t made it happen. But when I ordered the new, double-paned window that would, fingers crossed, solve the issue of the enormous energy bill, I compromised on efficiency by leaving just enough space to install an old, single-paned, leaded-glass window at the top.

It turned out even better than we expected, and at night, with the gentle glow of streetlights outside, the warm light from within 607 radiated through the purples, blues, yellows, and reds of the old church window, announcing to all who would pass by the same message it had proclaimed for generations: the people of God gather here, and you are welcome.