When you step through the door of the warehouse/storefront known as The Shack off Baseline Road in Little Rock, there are booths, a round table and a piano.
"People come in, they say are you a restaurant?" Marty Mote says. "We say, are you hungry?"
Some days The Shack is a restaurant. Other days it's a laundry, coffee shop, thrift store, motel, community center or event venue. On Sundays it's a church.
It's sort of like the neighborhood Make-a-Wish Foundation, only instead of granting wishes for sick kids, The Shack grants wishes for the elderly, addicts, single mothers and the homeless. If pressed to assign a label, "street ministry" would probably cover it.
Lynda and Marty Mote met in 1984, when AT&T transferred Marty to El Dorado, where Lynda worked as an operator for the company. The two married within a year, but Marty struggled with substance abuse for decades.
"In 2003 I surrendered my life to Christ," Marty says. A churchgoer throughout his life, he jokes that his third baptism was the charm.
By that point the couple lived in Little Rock, and Marty began traveling to Peru multiple times a year with Geyer Springs Baptist Church on mission trips. When he retired from AT&T in 2010, he and Lynda planned to move to Peru and establish a street ministry.
While making arrangements, they started hosting free Friday night cookouts in a vacant lot in southwest Little Rock. Just when they began to feel accepted by the community, it was time to go. But on an exploratory trip to Peru, nothing seemed to be working. They couldn't find an apartment, and they missed their newborn first grandchild. Lynda became convinced that God wanted them back home.
"Sometimes God just wants to know that you're willing, and he's like 'OK, I know that the desires of your heart are to be here,'" she says.
There was an abandoned house next to their cookout lot. To Lynda it seemed like the perfect hospitality house for their fledgling ministry, Livin' Out Loud (LOL). "I just knew God wanted us to have that house and he was going to give it to us," she says.
But the owner balked at the idea of "those kind of people" in her place. Undaunted, the Motes, a pastor, a prostitute and a homeless man met in the house to pray that God's will be done.
Not long after, the house was bulldozed. The Motes were so disappointed that, when a woman from Geyer Springs Baptist donated a warehouse to LOL in 2012, their excitement was tainted with resentment. The warehouse was at the other end of Baseline Road, and they didn't want to earn a new community's trust. At first they used the space -- a former battery shop -- for storage and to host a few garage sale fundraisers.
Then, in 2013, someone donated an intact cabinet set, so the Motes installed it in a small room that had been the battery shop office and added second-hand appliances. These days it could be mistaken for a suburban home kitchen, with children's drawings on the fridge, a blender on the counter, plants on shelves and wooden spoons on walls. Only the steel bars, partially hidden behind dainty curtains, give it away.
Coffee is on, of course. Coffee is always on.
Over coffee, Christine Ballin, 31, who calls the Motes "Mom" and "Dad," talks about how, in a single year, she lost her mother, aunt and cousin, and her husband left her with two children. Ballin started shooting up, her children became wards of the state, and she found herself sleeping under a bridge.
When she came to The Shack in early 2014, she had no idea what it was. She just wanted to borrow a phone. The Motes fed her and offered her a shower and clean clothes, celebrating the arrival of their second neighborhood "client." It took the better part of a year, but ultimately Ballin sobered up, "through coming here and them looking at me and seeing me as a person ... not someone who was worth spitting on or stepping on," she says.
Sobriety stuck. Now Ballin is employed, has a house and a minivan and teaches Sunday School for The Shack's church. She's working on bringing her children home.
Back then The Shack didn't have a name (it was christened shortly after, when a neighborhood preteen strolled in and proclaimed, "It's good to be back in the shack"). It was nothing but the kitchen and a second cavernous room. But the Motes have carved the space into smaller rooms, building a wall from donated doors and installing a shower stall and a washer and dryer. There's a small food pantry and a thrift shop/free boutique.
People hang out, charge their phones, play games and wash clothes. If they're hungry, they can get something to eat.
The Shack has church in The Well House, a room with tables and chairs instead of pews. On one wall is a cross made from salvaged wood. Marty prepares a lesson and the congregation of 12-20 people munch on muffins and sip coffee.
Lynda remembers a time when they learned, through chance, that a neighbor who offered his home as an informal halfway house had his water shut off due to nonpayment. The Motes paid the $584 water bill one Friday afternoon out of their personal account, even though they live on a fixed retirement income that Marty sometimes supplements with yard work. They were worried about the unexpected expense, but that Sunday they spoke at Geyer Springs Baptist and an offering was collected. Afterward they counted the money.
"It was $584, the exact amount of the water bill," says Lynda. "Boom. Thank you, God."
In other instances they've helped an elderly woman get an oven and given their car to a single parent. (Shortly after, a car was donated. It became the Motes' "new" car.)
"We make a point of getting to know people and getting to know what their real needs are," Marty says.
For Lynda, Matthew 25:35 sums it up. "It's where Jesus is saying, 'I was hungry and you gave me something to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was homeless and you gave me a bed. I was shivering and you gave me clothes.' That's kind of our existence here."
The Shack accepts donated goods and services. Send monetary donations to Livin' Out Loud, 605 Nancy Lane, Hensley, Ark., 72065. For more information, call Lynda at (501) 681-7122.
High Profile on 09/11/2016