Sunday, April 06, 2014

Heavenly Home

 
NORTH JAVA - Joe McMahon and Kelly Smith were between a rock and a hard place.
Finding good and affordable housing is hard enough locally. But add seven kids and landlords can become less than accommodating.
Joe and Kelly’s dilemma has proven just the ticket for Holy Family Parish. Faced with a large and vacant rectory, the church was looking for somebody to fill the space.
Call it a match made in Heaven.
“It’s a pretty long story,” Joe said Tuesday. “We were pretty down on our luck, as far as we can get.”
Both natives of the Buffalo area, Joe and Kelly were living in Arcade until a few months ago, when they and their family were evicted from the place they’d resided for the previous six years.
The family was facing about year’s wait until they could get a home loan for military vets — Joe had served in the Marines — and their outlook wasn’t brightening.
They moved to a small place in Delevan in Cattaraugus County briefly, while one of their daughters stayed with Kelly’s mother. They also spent a few months in a hotel, always looking for suitable new housing.
“We were so freaked out,” Joe said. “We lived in this place six years, and we were given 29 days’ notice. Seven kids, we were like, ‘How is this going to work?’ We were concentrating on moving our stuff out, but where the hell are we going to go?”
Kelly said there’s a lot of ignorance, and they wouldn’t get calls back, after telling prospective landlords how many kids they had. They reached the point of saying they had four children, but didn’t want to lie.
“We were close to moving in with family members,” Joe said. “Hers or mine, and I was close to moving in with my brother.”
Enter Holy Family Parish, whose advertisement the couple saw in a local pennysaver.
“We wouldn’t believe how excited we were when we saw that,” Joe said.
The rectory had been vacant for about 10 years, during which the parish was shut by Buffalo’s Roman Catholic Diocese, and was later resurrected by the Polish National Catholic Church.
The building’s office was used occasionally for meetings in recent years, but it was otherwise unused. And its size made it a good choice for larger families, with six bedrooms, one-and-a-half bathrooms, a kitchen and more.
Thus the parishioners wanted the old rectory to be used. It was rehabbed last summer, including significant repairs by inmate work crews from the New York State Department of Corrections.
The rectory first hosted a nearby family burnt out by a fire in 2012, and then a single mom with six children until last August, when it became vacant again.
“We don’t want it to sit empty because there are people who can use it,” said Karen Wilson, who belongs to the parish’s building committee. “I put an ad in the paper, and Joe and Kelly were the first ones to answer it. Then I had three or four phone calls. I showed to three more families, but most of them didn’t qualify, because we won’t allow any pets or smoking.”
And it proved perfect for the couple and their family.
North Java is close to Arcade, where Joe works at his longtime API Air Tech job. It also provides relatively easy access to Attica Central School for the couple’s younger children, along with East Aurora, where their oldest children still attend.
“We could have gone South Buffalo way, but we both decided the schooling out here is safer,” Joe said. “Our kids grew up out here. That was a big point of staying in this area.
“My daughters basically went to school since kindergarten out here,” Kelly added. “We lived out here, and I like it out in this area too.”
Joe and Kelly looked at the rectory early last month. They received approval from the parish, and moved officially on March 16. They pay a basic “user fee” to cover the utilities and basic upkeep.
The couple have proverbially “hit it off” with Karen and their new neighbors, and are planning to stay awhile. And the full rectory helps fulfill the parish’s own mission.
“So far the family is ecstatic,” said Rev. Matt Kawiak, the parish pastor. “They’ve got some stability, and the parish s elated that after six months of renovation ... that they’ve found somebody who needed a place to stay. It’s a win-win for both, the community as well as the family.”
“It’s like God answered their prayers in my feelings,” Wilson said. “It’s like God sent them here, and they’re supposed to be here. The house is now alive with children. It’s a big house with a lot of bedrooms, and it’s going to keep everything alive.”

Lord, I pray for all my Sonshine Friends who open their homes to family and friends in distress. May the spirit of hospitality bring our family closer together during the Easter Season.