Grace Chan - Community Living for Mutual Transformation

Our family moved into our Scarborough home in 2018—a five-level backsplit with a 500-square-foot basement apartment and a separate entrance. We were told it had great income potential. And it did. But as we prayed over our home, we sensed the Lord inviting us into something different.

We felt called not to list the apartment. Not to seek a tenant. Instead, we were to pray and trust that God Himself would bring the person He had chosen to live there. We also knew this would not be a regular landlord–tenant arrangement. Anyone who lived in our home would share life with us—real life—and, in time, become part of our family. Discipleship has always been close to our hearts, and we understood that opening our doors meant opening ourselves.

Over the past eight years, we have shared our home with six different residents. Each time, rent was set intentionally low—enough to provide dignity, stability, and a launchpad into the next stage of life. Other times, we charged nothing at all. In those seasons, we walked closely with individuals who were at risk and in need of greater care, supporting them through mental health struggles, financial instability, and deep personal pain. Our hope was never just to provide shelter, but to help each person move forward in strength and wholeness.

One such resident was an international student from India. She came to Canada to attend college and was introduced to my husband through a mutual acquaintance who knew we had a vacant apartment. She had just finished her studies and was desperately searching for work. J** moved in at the beginning of January 2020.

We were strangers at first, but from the beginning, I prayed for her daily—asking God for an opportunity to minister to her heart. On February 18, 2020, I felt a strong and unmistakable prompting from the Lord to invite her upstairs for tea and to share my testimony. We spent hours talking that day, slowly opening our lives to one another. That night marked the beginning of regular weekly discipleship, Bible study, and prayer together.

Later, once trust had grown, she shared something that still takes my breath away. That very afternoon—before my message—she had been lying on the floor of her apartment in complete despair, seriously contemplating suicide. In the middle of her tears, she received my invitation to come upstairs for tea. And as God would have it, my story of sin, brokenness, and redemption in Jesus met her right in that moment. For the first time in a long while, she felt deep, unexplainable joy.

My own children—some of them young adults now—often joke that we keep adopting more and more “kids” into our family. They know that opening our doors means life gets messy. It disrupts comfort. It costs time, energy, and sometimes peace. But they have also witnessed the healing that takes place when we open our hearts without condition—when we trust the Holy Spirit to lead and allow God to do what only He can do.

And every time, healing comes and the joy outweighs the mess.