Grace is the Antidote: Cash Lowe

Cash Lowe is the Organizational Chaplain at Shepherd’s House Ministries, and in a recent interview he explains why our team fell in love with the phrase “Grace Changes Everything.”

As the men and women who walk through our doors are marred with the mask of shame and fear, it is a crucial part of our mission to share the kind of love and grace that proves we are a genuine and safe community where true healing can take place.

We strive to be a place where there is freedom to remove the mask, peel back the layers that have built throughout years of living in crisis, and to learn together what it means to be authentic.

Cash has lived these experiences over and over again with the individuals who come to us seeking recovery. He has learned over the years that grace is the only thing that is powerful enough to overcome the shame and fear that lead us to patterns of dysfunction. Building relationships are key to developing a healthy sense of self, to build trust, to be held accountable by people who truly care, and to experience real connection.

What Grace means, and the effect it has.

To show grace: to deeply accept as one is, to step closer in times of darkness, to walk faithfully alongside each other without judgment – committing to this kind of relationship is the only thing that has the ability to pierce through the lies that keep individuals in cyclical pain.

You do not have to struggle with homelessness or addiction to feel the grips of shame and fear – which is why we so often see transformation not only in our residents but in our staff and volunteers. Cash shares that because of his work with Shepherd’s House Ministries – where he is asked daily to take off the mask and live in authenticity, he experiences transformation in his own life.

“When I am living in an environment of grace, even with nothing hidden – with all of my shame out on the table? It translates to my wife gets a better husband. My children get a better father. Because I am living in the freedom of Christ at that point, and shame has no longer has any control over me, fear no longer runs my life or dictates what I do from one day to the next. I can take off any mask that the world has handed me and truly live in authenticity.”

Cash has a favorite quote from Johann Hari, and it never gets old:

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety,
the opposite of addiction is connection.”

 
Cash believes that this deep connection can only happen in an environment that is filled with grace, where we as a community come together and lay everything on the table. Where we each commit to authenticity and commit to loving each other more because we have the courage to show up with nothing hidden.