My encounter with Jean Vanier’s friends that day had been my only contact with the mentally and physically challenged. Until this summer.

Now here I was, just turned twenty-nine, an actress who’d temporarily left behind a blossoming career and a social life unhinged after a decade of bad choices — the wrong drugs, the wrong men, possibly even the wrong profession, the right booze but far too much of it. Usually to be found in a small Vancouver apartment with her cat.

Now living in an ancient farmhouse in central France with six severely handicapped men. At the moment, trying to sleep beside Jean-Claude and Emile in a sodden tent in a dwindling thunderstorm in a sea of sheep.

The motto of L’Arche was “Changing the world, one heart at a time.” So far, the place was working wonders with mine.