Valerie Paradis 1942 –

In 1972, Valerie had just graduated from divinity school when she visited Evergreen, a Bruderhof in Connecticut, for a weekend. She wasn’t at all impressed at first, “but something – I don’t know what – something touched my heart.” She soon returned and decided to stay.

I was in the community for about twenty years. Then I began having psychiatric problems, and in 1993 I checked into a hospital. I was paranoid, and angry – my illness made me lose trust in the people I knew and in the community. There was misunderstanding and confusion on both sides. I told them I didn’t want anything more to do with them.

I was away for the next twenty-five years, and spent about twenty of those in psychiatric care. I lived like a hermit. I tried to commit suicide multiple times. Then, I began falling and ended up in a nursing home.

Then one day, someone came to the door and said, “Are you Valerie?” It was a couple from the Bruderhof who I used to know. For years I had reacted very negatively to any contact, but this time I didn’t. I don’t know why. They told me people had been looking for me – praying for me. I said, “No way!”

The next day, Verena, an old friend, came in to see me. “Why would anybody want me around?” I asked her. “I made such a mess out of things.” She said, “The past is the past. It’s forgiven and forgotten.” I felt like a light came on in my life.
In early 2018, Valerie returned. Today, she spends several hours a day working in the community’s woodshop in Maple Ridge, folds laundry, and reaches out to others, like Heidi, a forty-five-year-old with cerebral palsy whom she invites once a week for story time. She says:

I could still be in that nursing home. I actually thought I’d die there. But here I’m surrounded by so much love. And my source of joy is giving back that love.