Almost Home

Saturday night I had one of those life changing experiences that you encounter when faith bumps up against reality. I have a good friend who has been after me for joining him at En Christo all year long and this past weekend I committed to going with him. En Christo is a ministry founded and hosted by Whitworth College students and has been reaching the homeless and down and out for the past 17 years. Here is a link to find out more about thier ministry.

I joined up with John and Chelsea and we headed up to Otis 5 (5th floor of the Otis Hotel) where we began passing out bagged sandwiches to the residents. We handed out lunches to several of the residents who just took the bags and then retreated back into their rooms. However we had substantial conversations with 3 of the residents - for confidentiality reasons I will just affectionately call them Larry, Moe, and Curly.

Larry was the first guy that we met and probably impacted me the most. The college student who normally ministers on the hall had started a bible study in 1 John with Larry and so John and I picked up where they had left off. Larry is married and as far as I could tell had no children. His wife stayed in the living room and talked to Chelsea so I never met her. Larry explained to us that they normally study the passage all week and then they come together and talk about what they had observed. Honestly, I was expecting a surface level look at the passage and thought our time would be more encouraging to him than anything. I was absolutely stunned by his depth of thinking, theological understanding, and the uncanny ability of applying the passage to real life. He must have talked for 10 minutes about the things he had seen in the passage and took us to several other passages where he saw a connection and I was honestly having a hard time keeping up with his theological implications.

He finally came to the end of his observations and I sat looking at him scrambling for something wise and pastoral to say. All I could muster was, "Have you ever been to seminary? Ever think about being a Pastor?" He chuckled and looked down at the floor. "There are some things that we do in life that prevent us from doing other things in life. You see, I am a sex offender." He kept talking but I don't remember what he said after that because I was stunned. I was sitting across the table from a sex offender. Now it is one thing to read this or to have heard stories, but to enter the home of an offender and to sit across the table, to shake his hand and to share over the Scriptures together...well, that is quite a different thing.

We continued talking and he told us his story and the tragic lifestyle that he had come out of. He said he had hurt many, many people. I have no idea what kind of baggage, guilt and shame that he must carry with him. At the end of our conversation I was profoundly affected by the experience. I prayed for and with him and shook his hand again. My one encounter with Larry opened up so much of the New Testament Scriptures to me. No longer was Jesus' encounter with tax collectors, rebels, and prostitutes just words, but now they had a face.

We then met Moe who was probably a 50 yr. old sitting in the middle of his floor surrounded by at least 20 beer cans and smoking the tip end of a cigarette. He is a member of the Hell's Angels and was even polite enough to show us his tattoo, jacket and some pictures. He told us that a year ago he had crawled into the bottle after a friend had been killed downltown and not found the courage to crawl out again. We stood at his doorway and talked for several minutes - mainly we listened to his stories, gathered a few prayer requests so that we could "shoot them up to the man upstairs, because prayer really works".

Curly was an interesting guy who has a lot of medical issues. He also stood at his door and talked for quite awhile. We talked about the tv show "cops", the nature of man, the state of technology today and man's laziness in the area of creativity.

After I finished meeting these men and hearing their stories I felt compelled to come back again and again. I'm already looking forward to my next opportunity to rub shoulders with the unlovely in this world. I am praying for them this week and hope to build deeper relationships so that I may grow in my own intimacy with the Lord as well as introduce them to the Christ I love.

I have included a song that I heard last night as I was driving home. It was very timely so I thought I would share it along with today's blog.

(Craig Morgan, "Almost Home")