Posted by Since childhood, Kathy Izard felt like she was being called to do something important with her life. She mostly ignored that still, small voice until she was 44 and had an experience in which she had to make a choice. She could continue down the road she was going – or attempt something seemingly impossible, for which she was totally unqualified, and change her community for the better. She chose the impossible. And she made it happen.
In doing so and sharing her story, she set up chains of events that led other people to discover God’s purpose for their lives and follow it as well. Kathy shares many of those stories in her book “Trust The Whisper: How Answering Quiet Callings Inspires Extraordinary Stories of Ordinary Grace,” and we discussed it recently on “Christopher Closeup” (podcast below).
Kathy earned a Christopher Award in 2017 for her memoir “The Hundred Story Home.” She and her family had been volunteering at a soup kitchen that served the homeless in Charlotte, North Carolina. After reading the book “Same Kind of Different as Me,” co-authored by formerly homeless man Denver Moore, she invited him to speak at an event benefiting the soup kitchen. As Kathy gave Denver a tour of the facility, which she thought would impress him, he instead lamented that they had no beds where the homeless could sleep. “What are you going to do about it?” he asked her.
Denver’s words haunted Kathy and amplified what she calls the whisper that had long been encouraging her to do something more with her life. She explained, “That [whisper] felt inconvenient and uncomfortable, and I certainly was unqualified to do anything about housing…But at the same time, it was insistent.”
Kathy quit her graphic design job to focus entirely on this new dream, then she connected with the right people. Together, she said, “We first started a pilot program called Homeless to Homes, and we moved 13 people directly from street to home, chronically homeless men and women who had been on the streets, probably an average of about eight to 10 years.”
That program changed the lives of the homeless people who participated in it, so Kathy and her team realized they needed to do more. In 2008, they launched a $10 million capital campaign to create a new residence for the homeless that came to be called Moore Place, when it opened in 2012. “It has changed the way this community believes that we can and should take care of those who are experiencing homelessness,” she said.
Kathy called it “miraculous” that they were able to raise that much money during the Great Recession, so she credits God with being a part of the plan to make it happen. “In the beginning, when I was hearing those whispers, I thought, ‘I can’t be called to this because only priests and nuns and monks and ministers are called.’ But I came to shift and understand that I think we’re all called, there’s something whispering to each one of us…I hate to think how many times I was down at the soup kitchen and maybe feeling a little tug or nudge to do something more, but just saying, ‘Nope, not mine to do. Homelessness, that’s an unsolvable problem.’…I do believe that God doesn’t leave us alone in our whispers. I think He brings along the folks that we need to help us. I’ve seen that time and time again, and that’s what I tried to bake into these stories [in ‘Trust the Whisper’]: ordinary people who were called to something that felt so much bigger than themselves, but yet it was important. And I do believe that we can learn anything if it’s important to us, and we will have put into our path the people, the resources, the things we need to help implement them.”
As an example, Kathy shared the story of Betsy Blue, who she got to know on a “girls trip” with some of her friends. Betsy was aware of what Kathy had done with Moore Place, so she shared her interest in helping the mentally ill because she had a family member with bipolar disorder – and because there were 5.6 million people in a 100 mile radius of Charlotte, but not one residential facility for mental health care. Kathy’s own mom suffered from the same condition years ago, so she felt motivated to offer advice. Betsy had no experience in this area, though, so she was unsure if she should follow these promptings inside her.
Across the street from the inn where Kathy’s group was staying were the grounds of an old monastery, so the ladies went to walk around one morning. “There was an outdoor chapel at one side of the property,” Kathy recalled, “and as we walked down there, there was an altar where people had left things: offerings to God, different flowers, crosses, rosaries. There were [also] some pages, and Betsy ended up picking up those pages, going to sit down and started reading them. I realized that she was crying as she was reading them. We went over to figure out what in the world had she found. It turned out it was a letter written by a mom who had a bipolar daughter, and it was a letter that was pleading to God for help. Her daughter was a runaway, and the mother didn’t know how to find her. She didn’t know how to help her. But it was just page after page of a prayer to God asking for help. And Betsy took this as her sign [to move forward with her idea].”
Kathy, Betsy, and 10 others came together to form a board to get this project off the ground. None of them had medical or psychiatric experience, but they all had a family member who had suffered mental health issues. Three years and $27 million later, they opened Hope Way, “Charlotte’s first residential mental health treatment center. It’s a beautiful campus. It’s outpatient and inpatient. We’ve expanded. We treat over 500 clients in a given year and have just opened up something for children and adolescents, as well as eating disorders. So it really is a world-class center, which I think has a lot of miracles behind it…very divinely inspired. Betsy talked about that in the book and shared how it started out as this whisper, but she really believes it was her purpose – and her husband, Bill’s – to do the impossible and make this place real.”
As a result of her accomplishments, Kathy gets invited to speak to groups all over the country. She has come to believe that each of these events include at least one person that God wants her to talk with. She said, “I’ve spoken a lot in the last eight years in part because of the attention and the stamp of approval that the Christopher Awards gave ‘The Hundred Story Home.’ I can’t undersell that. I was appreciative of the platform this award gave to it. But I speak all over the country…I go to talk, but I always go to listen [and ask], Who’s the one person that I wouldn’t meet unless I was showing up at this church or this conference? And who needs some encouragement to do whatever it is that they’re doing? And it happens pretty regularly, as if God’s saying, ‘Just get yourself there. I’ve got the person you need to meet.’…The first time I really knew [it was with] a woman, Caroline Bundy in Birmingham, Alabama. When I spoke to her and her whisper, I knew, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the reason I’m here, to talk to her.’ She ended up opening a shelter for [runaway] teens in Birmingham, Alabama.”
Listening for God’s whispers isn’t relegated to adults. That’s why Kathy penned an accompanying illustrated children’s book titled “Grace Heard a Whisper.” She notes that churches, schools, and Sunday schools could “read the two books together as a parent-child read or a grandparent-child read…You’re never too old or too young to listen.”
On the older side of that age spectrum is Miss Jo from Kingsport, Tennessee. When she read “The Hundred Story Home,” Miss Jo was 100 years old. It made her determined to help the unhoused and build a shelter in her community. “She started her nonprofit at 102 years old,” Kathy said. “When she passed away at 105 years old, she asked that all donations be made in her memory to The Grace House, which is going to open in Kingsport, Tennessee. They don’t have a shelter right now, so that will be opened in her honor. And in case you’re listening and you think this is all about homelessness and housing, it’s not. There are stories throughout this book of different things that people have done, from adopting children to mental health and even a woman who just sent notes of encouragement and why it mattered. So there’s whispers, big and small.”
The divine influence on all these stories is never far from Kathy’s mind, so when she was reading the novel “Rare Objects” by Kathleen Tessaro, she learned the Hebrew word “nitzotzot,” which gave her a new perspective on seeing God’s presence in this world.
She explained that the word “translates to ‘divine sparks.’ It’s the idea that there’s the tiniest, infinitesimal pieces of the divine, not only in each of us, but in everything in creation. And when things are used for their divine purpose, they are set to release those sparks and to shine like the face of God in the world. It is a core teaching in many religions, this idea of Tikkun Olam, that the world at one point broke apart and these divine spark shards were a part of it. Our job is to come together and mend the world. So, as I was writing all these stories and the divine connections between them…I started to realize that these God dot connections were not how each one of us can do something by ourselves, but how together we can plug into God’s divine electricity, if you would, to shine our light and repair the world. I feel like that’s what these stories show: tasks that should have been unreasonable and impossible, but yet together they did become possible. I do think that’s because God was involved in each one of these stories and is involved in our lives. Sometimes we think, where’s God? We say, ‘Well, that was just a coincidence, that wasn’t God.’ I think we dismiss a lot of these holy moments, even when they’re happening all the time.”
Ultimately, Kathy hopes that readers of “Trust the Whisper” and “Grace Heard a Whisper” come to “realize that we’re all capable of far more than we imagine, and that [the books] give them faith and courage when they hear even the tiniest whisper – something small – to follow it and see what happens. Maybe that confirmation gives them even more faith and courage for when something big comes along. Because I do think these small stirrings in our soul are connecting us to each other, to God, and to our truest purpose in the world.”
(To listen to my full interview with Kathy Izard, click on the podcast link):
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