It's the drugs, stupid!

Every so often, I get gobsmacked with the reason why we're doing what we're doing at Gospel Mission / The Lord's Rain. It reminds me of the need in the area -- and indeed, any area savaged by drugs and poverty, and those areas are becoming more numerous all the time -- and how we're evidently in the right place and the right time.

This past Saturday morning was an utter zoo at the Lord's Rain -- and I apologize to any cheetahs, wildebeests, lowland gorillas and giant cockroaches from the Brazilian rainforests that might be reading this. It was directly after Welfare Wednesday, a day when the drug traffic takes a sudden spike. People who came into The Lord's Rain were incoherent. One man, visiting us for the first time, sat on a chair, drinking coffee and talking to himself -- or to me, it was hard to tell; equally hard to tell was the language he was speaking -- and bursting out laughing from time to time. Davona, who's become a regular (and Danilo insists is not on drugs but is "only" seriously mentally ill), spent her time talking to herself and trying on piece after piece of donated clothing; while two others, Debbie and Shelley, were dancing the Pigeon Park Gavotte -- that sort-of wavering music-less shuffle that you see many people doing on the streets in the Hastings and Carrall area -- often with a cup of coffee in one hand.

Some others, who were not on drugs -- like Charlotte and Brendan, a homeless couple in their 30s, and a pair of Quebecois men who are also regulars -- simply sat and laughed at the floor show they were getting for free. It was hard not to laugh, even though we were watching the effects that drugs have on people who, at one time or another, had been beautiful, bright people with a world of promise in front of them.

Across the street, the drug deals were going down. I had come down the night before to lock up after the Friday night service, and spent some time sitting in my car, watching the scene. Lookouts were standing oh-so-casually at each end of the alley across from Gospel Mission. They're very effective at what they do: in the past, I've seen a whole herd of buyers and sellers in the alley vanish into thin air about 30 seconds before a couple of police officers stroll past. As we left The Lord's Rain on Saturday morning, one cop was zip-strapping two of those same lookouts and waiting for his backup to arrive. We said a quiet prayer of thanks and protection for the officer.

Then came Saturday night, and the regular service at Gospel Mission. It was a good crowd, and an unusual message -- based on Shakespeare's Sonnet XXIX. All these years, I'd assumed he'd been writing to a girl, but after reading an interesting theory that Shakespeare (or whoever wrote the works attributed to a certain gentleman farmer and actor from Stratford-Upon-Avon) was also on King James I's Bible translation team, it hit me between the eyes that he was writing it about Jesus. The message also spun off into a look at the implications of Jesus' assertion that He will come "as a thief in the night", and Jeremiah's description (49:9) that when a thief breaks in, he trashes the place and doesn't leave anything behind. So it will be when Jesus returns.

But the message was punctuated with outbursts from one fellow off at the side. I'd met him earlier in the year at The Lord's Rain: his name is Joseph, and he came in that morning stinking drunk and wanting to find the part in the Bible that lists the Seven Deadly Sins. There is no such reference: according to Wikipedia, the Seven Deadly Sins were listed by the 4th Century monk, Evagrius Ponticus. But what became apparent as we talked was that he knew Scripture, was incredibly intelligent, but for whatever reason was busily drinking his life away.

I usually cut people a lot of slack, but Joseph reached the end of my patience when he made a personal remark about one of the other guys there, and I warned him that if he made one more outburst, he'd be out of there without supper. He quietened down, then lay down on the pew and went to sleep.

The message ended, we served supper, and as people were lining up for seconds, I realized Joseph was still asleep. I went over to wake him, and he wouldn't budge. He was breathing, but absolutely un-wakable. John, who, two weeks before, had woken up to find his roommate dead on the kitchen floor, checked for a pulse, and that's when we saw the staples in Joseph's scalp. Someone said, "call 9-1-1", and I did. Fritz, one of the regulars, helped me roll Joseph onto his back.

The firefighters were first to arrive. "Oh, look," one of them said, "it's the chain guy!" Apparently, Joseph had been whacked in the head with a chain the day before and these same firefighters had treated him. They managed to rouse him just as the paramedics got there.

Joseph basically was OK -- except for being drunk and drugged and having a dozen staples holding his head together. The paramedics got out of him that he'd smoked rock cocaine earlier, on top of the booze. They checked his vital signs, took a blood sugar test, and packed up and left. I gave Joseph his hamburger, some cookies and a glass of Coke, and we talked.

"You need to spend more time here," I told him. "You know your Scripture, man." He laughed. I pressed the point. "I'm serious: you could be an awesome witness to others."

One of the things about Joseph is his quick laugh and a wry sense of humor. I walked with him down the stairs -- going ahead of him in case he fell. Not surprisingly, he pretended to fall. We laughed. He left in the direction of Pigeon Park, and I truly hope he comes back -- and often.

But I went back upstairs wanting to break something. Joseph was just the most recent in a long list of people that day, who were beautiful, intelligent, worth no less in God's eyes than you or I, and who had been written off by society. "Let them have their drugs -- who cares?" That's the attitude that comes off so much of the approach our society takes. But who's counted the cost here? Look at the resources deployed when we called about Joseph: three firefighters, four paramedics, two ambulances and a fire truck -- all to deal with someone who was drunk and on drugs. What if someone had had a heart attack, or there'd been a fire, or a building collapse, or a traffic accident, with those seven people and three vehicles tied up?

It's the drugs, stupid!

In Canada, we take great delight in sneering at the United States, and one of these exercises in smugness has been to declare that the War on Drugs has "failed". But what are the fruits of Canada's "peace treaty" with drugs?

If you need an answer to that rhetorical question, look at the multiple black eyes Vancouver has received over the past decade for the state of poverty in the shadow of such opulence. The further our city gets away from God, the more frequent and painful those black eyes will become.

Neither approach has been a resounding success. "Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." With Jesus reduced to Just Another World View (and a politically-incorrect one at that), people have tried to go ahead without God's guidance.

That's why The Lord's Rain and Gospel Mission are in the place they're supposed to be in. One reason has been for us to be a refuge for people on the street -- especially those who need an ambulance. But more than that, we've noted before that the history of Gospel Mission has involved its being established in advance of various social catastrophes that have required its services. When the church moved to 331 Carrall Street in the 1940s, who would have predicted that Pigeon Park would be the fulcrum of despair that it started becoming in the 60s. More than that, it's directly in the face of the worst alley in the city for open-air drug dealing, and establishing The Lord's Rain on the ground floor has given us an up-close-and-personal view -- and no end of people to pray over and minister to.