The Mother on Montrose Avenue

In 2019, a Chicago journalist profiled a woman named Denise Williams who had spent eleven years standing on the same corner of Montrose Avenue every Friday night. Her son Marcus had joined a gang at fifteen and told her never to come back. She came back anyway. Every single week she stood under the same flickering streetlight with a thermos of coffee and a bag of hand warmers, waiting. Gang members mocked her. Strangers told her to give up. Once, someone threw a bottle that cut her forehead. She showed up the next Friday with a bandage and the same thermos.

A reporter asked why she kept returning to a place where she was clearly not wanted. Denise said, "Because that's where my son is. And as long as he's breathing, I'm showing up."

Marcus eventually came home. But what shook the journalist was learning that Denise had done this for four other mothers too — mapping the corners where their children stood, teaching them to show up even when every sign said stop.

When Jesus looked out over Jerusalem — the city that killed prophets and stoned the messengers of the Most High — He did not turn away. "How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing." That lament is not defeat. It is the cry of a love that refuses to stop showing up, even when the bottle is already in the air.