I Went Inside and Met Sharon

Erin Doom

Sep 9

6 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

A Sales Call, a Logismos, and an Ordinary Podvig

Commemoration of the Holy & Righteous Ancestors of God, Joachim & Anna

Anno Domini 2026, September 9

I’VE BEEN in some pretty rough neighborhoods and some very low-income houses. But I had never considered refusing to knock on the door and give the appointment a shot. This time was different. I almost refused to do the appointment when I pulled up.

The house was worth about $46,000. It stood in a bad neighborhood with junk piled everywhere. All I knew was that a single woman lived there. But one look at the place told me there was almost certainly no sale to be made. Still, it was my job to knock on the door. So I took the next step.

I have learned not to judge these things too quickly. I have sold water systems to people I would never have expected to buy one. I have walked into houses where a sale seemed impossible and walked out with a signed contract. Poor people need clean water too. So I went inside.

I could hardly get through the doorway because of all the junk. The house was easily the dirtiest and most structurally unsafe home I had ever entered. The floors sagged and felt soft beneath my feet. In places, I was genuinely afraid I might fall through.

The woman’s name was Sharon. When she learned that my name was Erin, she laughed. Sharon and Erin. Our names rhymed, and she got a kick out of that. Raucous laughter. That's usually a good sign.

But it soon became clear that the condition of the house was not the only problem. I asked Sharon whether she had a job.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

“Where do you work?”

“Right here in my home.”

I asked a few more questions. She explained that she was learning how to buy houses with delinquent property taxes. She would acquire one, draw up a contract, sign it over to somebody else, and make five, ten, maybe twenty thousand dollars.

“Have you made any money doing that yet?”

Well, no. Not yet. But she was working on it. She was getting close.

So I asked how she was supporting herself right now. She immediately shifted to another plan. She went to garage sales and had accumulated all kinds of things she could sell. The evidence of that enterprise surrounded us on every side.

“But are you selling those things now? How are you making money today?”

The plan changed again. She needed to get a boyfriend. A boyfriend could help take care of her and give her some money. But she did not really want a boyfriend because boyfriends told you what to do, and she was not going to put up with that. Having a boyfriend brought a whole set of other problems, and she wanted none of that.

Finally, I asked as plainly as I could: “Do you have a job that currently gives you an income?”

No. She did not.

She told me that she had lived in this house for twenty years and that it was time for her to get a new one. The delinquent-tax plan, I realized, was not merely a business idea. It was part of a fantasy through which she imagined escaping the life collapsing around her.

There was no reason to perform a water demonstration. There was no possibility of financing a filtration system, and it would have been wrong to try. I told her gently that she needed a real source of income. I explained a little about reverse osmosis and clean drinking water. Then I told her that when she had her new home and a job with income, she could call me, and I would help her get clean water.

As I walked toward the door to go to my car for a gift we normally give homeowners after performing the water tests, I noticed bugs moving across the floor.

Termites! That explained the sagging. The softness beneath my feet. The fear that I might fall through.

The house was not merely cluttered or neglected. It was being consumed from within.

I made it safely out of Sharon's home, got the gift, and delivered it to her on the front porch. She was already in her rickety chair. Technically, I shouldn't have given it to her. I had not tested her water. But Sharon needed whatever help I could place in her hands. And boy was she excited: “I’m going to use this to work on my car!”

When I returned to my car to leave Sharon behind, a thought entered my mind. Why had Cynthia sent me here?

Cynthia is our queuer. Other people initially set the appointments, but she calls to confirm them and finalizes the leads before sending us out. I am close to reaching my bonus for the first time. I needed an opportunity to make a sale. Instead, I had been sent into a gross, stinking, dangerous house where there had never been any possibility of selling anything.

I was not angry. But I could feel one thought attaching itself to another. Why had Cynthia confirmed this lead? Why had I been sent here? Why had my time been wasted?

Evagrius understood the power of these thoughts—the logismoi. A thought presents itself, and then another joins it, and then another, until the mind has constructed an entire story around it. If I had continued following this one, it would have carried me toward anger, bitterness, and resentment.

I was doing what Adam did in the garden. I was beginning to blame. But I recognized the pattern.

Then I remembered the prayer I had forgotten to say.

Before entering a home, I usually make the sign of the cross and ask God to bless the encounter. I ask for the grace to see the people inside not merely as prospects but as human beings made in His image. I ask that I might treat them with dignity, show them the love of Christ, and, if I can, help them become healthier.

I had not said that prayer before entering Sharon’s home. But inside, I had still tried to live it. I had intentionally called her by her name. I had listened to her. I had tried to find the difficult balance between recognizing that there could be no sale and refusing to hurry away as though she were therefore of no value.

Remembering the prayer stopped the train of thought. That was the metanoia: the turning of the mind before a passing thought could become anger, before disappointment could harden into resentment, before Sharon could be reduced once again to a bad lead.

Perhaps this was the real podvig—the small spiritual struggle hidden inside an ordinary morning.

Not merely crossing the sagging floor, but recognizing the thought and turning away before it carried me somewhere I did not want to go.

From the perspective of sales, the appointment was worthless. It may have been the quickest house visit I have ever made. There was no water testing, no equipment presentation, no closing, no financing application, no contract, and no commission.

But the encounter was not worthless.

For a few minutes, Sharon was not a bad lead. She was not a dilapidated house, a low property value, a mental-health problem, or a story I could tell later about the worst home I had ever entered.

She was Sharon.

She was a woman with a son my age—a fifty-three-year-old man with six stents and serious heart trouble. She was struggling. And she was clearly not well. But someone had entered her home, listened to her, called her by her name, and allowed her to call him by his.

That mattered to her. I could tell.

Only after I left did I realize that Sharon’s house was three blocks from HopeNet, the nonprofit where my wife works. HopeNet provides mental-health care on a sliding scale. The kind of help Sharon appears to need is literally waiting three blocks from her door.

I usually leave a HopeNet pen in the homes I visit. It enters the conversation naturally after the water testing when I help the homeowner calculate the hidden costs of hard and dirty water. But because there was no water test, and thus no need to calculate her hidden costs, I never took one out.

Perhaps I will return with a HopeNet brochure and the pen I forgot to leave. That would sure be a different kind of follow-up, wouldn't it?

I do not want to romanticize any of this. Sharon’s house was filthy and dangerous. Her plans were disconnected from reality. She needs forms of help that I cannot give her, and recognizing the image of God in her does not require pretending that everything is all right. It means refusing to allow everything that is wrong to obscure the person who is still there.

Had I looked only at the house, I would have driven away. Had I looked only at the lead, I would have concluded that the visit was a waste of time. Had I looked only at what Sharon could do for me, there would have been no reason to cross that sagging floor.

But a lead is never merely a lead.

Every door opens upon a human being made in the image of God. Every sales call is also an encounter. I may enter hoping to sell someone clean water and discover that my real work is simply to listen, to speak truth without cruelty, to give a small and undeserved gift, or to place the possibility of help into someone’s hands.

I pulled up and saw a terrible lead. I went inside and met Sharon.