The one-time Greenbush Christian Academy and Alpena Christian School principal, who died after an illness in December, for many years volunteered as a Bible study leader and spiritual guide at Sunrise Mission, Alpena’s homeless shelter, and Sunrise Centre, a residential addiction treatment center in Alpena.

Now, others need to fill that gap for the sake of those struggling with the financial, emotional, and spiritual brokenness that comes with homelessness and addiction, said Barbara Mathern, Sunrise Mission director.

A community that deliberately connects its hurting to spiritual resources can help heal that brokenness, she said.

“It shows unconditional love to people who don’t feel loved,” Mathern said. “How can you offer more than that?”

News Photo by Julie Riddle Sean McDaniels, residential technical supervisor at the Sunrise Centre in Alpena, holds a book authored by Bible study leader Mike Cornelius at the center on Tuesday.

At the mission, where Cornelius served as Bible study leader and chaplain, he and another volunteer used to laugh so hard during their time with the mission’s guests that she’d have to shut the doors, Mathern said.

Several others from the community still come in to support residents spiritually, including a group of people who bring lunches “and reach out and just wrap people in love,” Mathern said.

A spiritual connection helps the employees and others working with those experiencing homelessness to act in compassion, their own faith being encouraging them to walk humbly beside those in crisis, she said.

That spiritual connection can mean even more to those who, at least in the non-spiritual world, see little to offer hope.

Some guests at the mission struggle with addiction and mental illness, “but also the things that life throws you, man,” Matheran said. “The things you can’t dodge.”

In the midst of struggles, the spiritual principles of love for others more than self, of the possibility of something beyond the present, can provide a lifeline not found elsewhere, she said.

“There’s nothing more powerful than love,” Matheran said. “And forgiveness. And not being judged.”

Fear of such judgment kept Amanda Espinoza out of churches for years as she battled addiction.

When she first started fighting addiction, she shut down if anyone mentioned God, and, even as she grew curious about religion, she was afraid of rejection if she attended a church service in Alpena.

Now, after finding an accepting congregation and sitting in on Cornelius’s Bible studies at the Sunrise Centre, Espinoza eagerly studies the addiction-specific Recovery Bible she said she would have thrown if someone had tried to give it to her a few years ago.

The acceptance she found in spiritual teachings made all the difference in her recovery, said Espinoza, who now works at the Sunrise Centre as a care manager.

The center’s Bible studies have stopped for the time being, because nobody has stepped up to fill Cornelius’s shoes.

That hole means less support for people who, consumed by their addiction, think themselves the center of the universe, said Sean McDaniels, a residential technical supervisor at the center and person in recovery.

He doesn’t hold to Christian traditions, but faith in “something bigger than yourself” can, McDaniels has seen, counteract the mindset that nothing matters but the next fix.

People in addiction may appear tough and say they’re fine, “when, really, I’m broken and scared,” he said.

To succeed in recovery, said McDaniels, those addicted need to face their underlying hurts and fears and “get sensitive and touchy” – a vulnerability that spirituality embraces and encourages.

Kathy Freel, Sunrise Center director, hopes someone will step into Cornelius’s role and help the center’s residents believe in miracles – those described in scripture, and the miracle of getting to the other side of difficult days.

Faith – whether following traditional Christian teachings or other religious principles – gives people who feel they are falling something to hold on to, McDaniels said.

“Faith in something is better than faith in nothing,” he said. “If there’s no hope, what is there?”