Ministering Angels

Help is given where it's needed most. Spirits are lifted.

Part 1: I Need To Be There

Andrew & Julie. Photo by Luc Cherubino. Click image for info about the photographer.

After Julie, Andrew, and their kids arrive in Ottawa for what they expect to be a few days, they ask a simple question: “Where do the truckers need the most help?” That’s how they end up on the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway, where many Convoy trucks still remain, isolated from the larger protest in Ottawa’s downtown core.

One side of the Parkway has traffic, the other side has parked trucks. “My husband took Bertha off the truck and put it on the median,” says Julie. “He just put the wood in and started getting the fire going.”

photo supplied by Julie

In Julie’s opinion, Andrew is “the star of the show with his big beard, his hat,” and his cookstove. Suddenly, they’re serving three hot meals a day. Much later, one of the truckers tells her what that meant:

He said his heart was warmed when he saw Andrew and myself and the three kids and all the stuff we were doing. He said, ‘Especially the fire. You guys brought everyone out of their trucks and to the fire.’

And it kind of made a family. Sort of a family developed around Bertha. So it wasn’t really about us, it was the fire.

In a snowstorm, Julie and Andrew drive all the way back home to fetch a camper trailer they’d purchased a few months earlier but hadn’t used yet. Then they settle in, down there on the Parkway. For the better part of three weeks.

photo supplied by Julie

“So we’re just flying by the seat of our pants,” remembers Julie. “Somebody else would get up and start the cookstove. I don’t know who did that. But when I got out there 6:30-ish, it was usually going.” A trucking couple who’d immigrated from Lithuania made scrambled eggs every morning, while Andrew and Julie cooked bacon and sausages.

Julie continues:

We went through trays of eggs and tons of sausages. It’s just a blur. OK, everybody’s fed. OK, clean up. Next meal. And supper was always bigger and more drawn out…

And then people started bringing food for us to heat up. People just started dropping stuff off, and the median was getting full of all kinds of stuff. Like water, but it was freezing. People would bring us salads, but sometimes the salads would freeze.

One day it warms up, and threatens rain. Julie tells a random trucker she wishes they had a tent:

And this is where God’s providence comes in. Because he goes, ‘Oh, I’ve got one.’

It was in the back of his dump truck. So he pulled it out and it was a perfect canopy. And we put tarps around it. And everything fit inside.

next installment: Rice and Beans