Beaming at the Mission

We are beaming this morning after last night's service at Gospel Mission. One of the messages I like to come back to is that anyone can share the Gospel with others - and that the guys (women come to the Mission services, too, but I call them all "guys") are uniquely qualified to witness to other street people, since they do have that shared experience.

This isn't a return to the belief I held for a while, that my own experience was too "white-bread" for people on the DTES to relate to. I finally got rid of that when the Lord reminded me, "you nearly died, and I saved you. That's all that matters. Now tell them about it." No, it's a question of people overcoming any thoughts that you have to have "Rev." in front of your name or a string of letters after it in order to preach the Gospel, but that each and every one of us is "allowed" and empowered to be Jesus' witnesses. His commandment to us in Acts 1:8 is directed at everybody.

Friday nights suddenly came vacant about 6 weeks ago, and we spent some time praying for another "team" to step up. It's a great opportunity for a church from outside the DTES to move into this vital mission field. After all, as I've mentioned before, Jesus' instructions to us in Acts 1:8 are to minister to "Samaria" -- land of the outcasts in our own backyard -- even before we turn our attention to "the uttermost part of the earth". But then Kim, Lincoln, John and Bill, who manage to fill in for me on Saturdays, said, "why don't we do it?" Barry and I prayed about it, and we've decided to try it out for a month.

Last night was Night One of the new team, and listening to Sean -- a fellow Bill brought in from the Salvation Army -- leading Worship, it hit me: this was the start of that "peer ministry" the Lord had put on my heart two years ago. Lincoln led the service, Kim gave a very well-researched message about God's desire for His people to prosper in all ways, Bill and Fred (who was very much involved at Rainbow Mission) made the food.

People were riding a "high" afterwards: they pulled it off, and I'll be interesting to see how far the Lord takes it and where it goes.

(Kim was also riding a high after seeing himself on the cover of the Vancouver Courier, featured in a story about "Free Geek". Check it out.)

***
And amid the hubris, something had to give. Fred had just been to the memorial for a young woman who'd died of an overdose. They were friends: he'd just seen her in a bar, and she told him, "I have to go home now". "You need to stop drinking, is what you need," he said. That evening, he saw the coroner's van outside the hotel where she lived and they were taking out a body. The next day, he found out who it was.

"She was always happy," he said. Can we say with a straight face that someone who was wired to drugs and booze on the Downtown East Side was "happy"? Oddly enough, in this part of town, there's a certain plausibility about that.

It turned out, she was one of four people of the same family who died in the past 10 days. One of them was Bingo, a man who came into The Lord's Rain often -- and sometimes upstairs to Gospel Mission. He was given to wearing colourful ties and keeping himself fairly neat. Apparently, he contracted food poisoning.

Amid the beaming and buzzing from a successful Opening Night for the new Friday "team", something to remind us about the reality of the job we have to do.

***
And another reminder of that reality: arriving this morning at The Lord's Rain, I came down the alley between Cordova and Hastings ... watching the rats darting back and forth (NB - we've had NO rats at Gospel Mission in well over a year: another sign God is protecting this place!) ... and there, in one of the doorways, was a young woman, tying an elastic around her arm, getting ready to shoot heroin. She knew I saw her, but it didn't matter: she was getting fix, and that was all that counted. But about half an hour later, she came into The Lord's Rain for coffee and a bun. At least she had a warm, dry place to come to.

The poor will always be with us, Jesus tells us, which is something we have to keep remembering when we see scenes like that or hear about Bingo and Fred's friend. Jesus didn't say they would be the same poor people. We're kidding ourselves to think we can ever eradicate poverty -- sorry, Bono: we can't make poverty history -- at least, not for the world. But with the Gospel and God's blessing, we can give hope to individuals so that they can make their own personal poverty history. Friday night at Gospel Mission showed us just how possible that can be.