We were working in Naples with prostitutes and homeless people who slept rough underneath the train stations. I found myself unable to say 'bye bye' and leave them to sleep in their cardboard boxes while we went back to our snugly beds, so we began to have people living with us and called it 'Casa Familia'. God provided even in dicey situations and during that year 20 people came to live with us for a season.

My art was my lifeline. Through painting I could digest some of the tragic and disturbing things that were happening on the streets, rather than keeping them inside. People who died under our noses. People who were so beyond retrieval that you had to watch as they rotted away on a footpath. People you invested in for a long, long time and then they came and said goodbye.

One day a friend who was a Lutheran pastor was looking at my pictures and said 'this is your way of praying, isn't it?' Up to then I hadn't realised that.

Society today has more and more intellectual stimuli that take away our innocence. We need to upgrade our faith to stay step by step with what life throws at us - things like euthanasia, cloning, abortion etc. Life is now so complex! There's a lot of need for well-trained people in the body of Christ to help people to heal wounds in a safe environment - like at the Jesus Centres - and the arts help to form insights into healing. There is so much spiritual searching going on out there.

Many people in today's world have never had the nurture that they should have had at the right time. I see the Jesus Centres as being places of healing for them. The healing comes to them through the nurture that comes from the committed discipleship relationships they find there.