Pray one for another ...

The developing theme in the messages in my Saturday night services at Gospel Mission is based on James 5, and the passage that begins, "confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed". The idea is that the people we serve -- "street people", "downtowneastsiders", whatever you want to call them -- are just as qualified to witness to and minister to others as any preacher. That's what Jesus' Ministry was primarily about: bringing God home to people (and vice versa) with His Son as the connection (and only connection, I might add). The Lord's half-brother is telling us that when we sit face-to-face and talk out our issues and pray together not for validation but to be healed of those issues, Jesus is with us to support us. It's important, too, to talk out those issues with people with whom we have a common experience.

This morning at The Lord's Rain, we saw some of that in action. Cherie is a young(ish) woman who's been a fixture on the DTES for quite a few years. Achingly pretty, and when she smiles, you want to bottle whatever it was that made her smile and give it to her to inhale whenever she can. She doesn't smile much. Indeed, there are times when she snarls at everybody and everything and is someone who, when I see her approaching, makes me either cringe or cry.

There's a line in one of our songs, "Daddy's little princess/pokin' her arm/she was a beauty once, they say": I thinks of Cherie when I think of that line.

Anyway, Cherie came in this morning, quite obviously whacked-out on drugs: barely able to stand, much less hold a cup of coffee. She had that peculiar gait that you see in people on drugs: their centre of gravity manages to stay put, but their knees bend slowly, and they rock back and forth - never quite falling, but not someone you'd let hang onto the Royal Doulton. She needed fresh clothes, and I was able to rustle up some new underwear and a pair of women's jeans that came in recently.

I've mentioned Shannon before: a 30-something woman who comes in with her husband. Both are weaning themselves off a variety of drugs, and she's one of the very few women I've met who's actually told me -- in a very matter-of-fact way -- that she had been a prostitute to support the drug habit.*

It wasn't just drugs that were Cherie's problem this morning. She also had a black eye. She told me she'd been beaten by two guys last night over $10. She was trying to eat as she told me, but her jaw still hurt and it was hard. Evidently, this girl needed to wash up and change. Shannon was outside, so I went and got her.

Shannon has been helping out at The Lord's Rain for a few months now, often just by sitting and listening to people and talking to them. "Confess your faults, one to another," right? She came in and sat with Cherie for a few minutes, then took her into one of the shower stalls. Shannon came out a few minutes later, fuming. "She's a working girl, eh? What makes guys think that just because a woman's a prostitute they can just beat on her?"

There's no constructive answer to that. 15 minutes later, Cherie came out in her fresh clothes, blow-dried her hair ... and smiled.

It was a morning where I saw James 5 at work: Shannon -- who certainly has her "stuff" together more than Cherie does -- talking to her, encouraging her, helping her with both the spirit and the physical need of getting her into the shower and getting her changed, and giving her hope.

Hope. That's the smile inducer Cherie needs, and it can't be kept in a bottle. Instead, it needs to flow in a constant stream -- from God, through Jesus and then through each of us, as we build one another up.

Just like James says.



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*I gag when I hear the expression "survival sex trade". It sounds so legitimate, doesn't it? Doesn't anyone realize what an indictment that is on our society? I remember an anecdote about New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who would in his role as Chief Magistrate for the city, preside over Magistrate's Court one day a month. One day, a man was brought before him who was charged with stealing bread. The man told him he was unemployed and unable to feed his family. LaGuardia accepted the guilty plea and fined him $50. Then he suspended the sentence, and fined everyone else in the courtroom $1 for living in a city where a man had to steal to feed his family and ordered the sergeant-at-arms to pass the hat, starting with himself. He then turned the money over to the man. LaGuardia could have stopped at suspending the sentence and called it something like "survival larceny", but he made the others present -- and those of us now, three generations later -- stop and think about where we are in this mess.

Letting go after 20 years ...

I realized this past week that it was 20 years ago that I got a chilling phone call. It was from the mother of a friend of mine, Peter Hegan. Pete and I had been friends since childhood -- had played together and, as we got older, jammed together with him on guitar and me on piano. We wrote songs together -- or actually, worked on each other's songs, bringing new dimensions to each other's material. He was quite a good poet, with a Biblical background: mine tended to be love-struck pop-flavoured mush, but it was all part of the growing up experience.

Probably the most important thing about my friendship with Pete was that most of the world had long since dismissed him as a waste of skin. He had been adopted as a baby, and for whatever reason never did fit in with anybody. He was smoking cigarettes by age 8, and while I had been on a one-child campaign to wipe out smoking in our lifetime (starting with my parents) and basically wanted nothing to with anyone who smoked, I still hung around with Pete.

He failed a couple of grades -- something he wore almost as a badge of honor -- and, since being a misfit was his main claim to fame, cultivated that sort-of outlaw image. Pete's salvation, it turned out, was Salvation. Around 7th grade, he dropped out of sight, and re-emerged around 9th or 10th grade as a completely different person. He had gone to some kind of juvenile rehab camp and then, he told me, "I woke up one morning and said, 'Pete, you are one f**ked-up kid!'". He immersed himself in two things: the Bible and his guitar.

Musical talent was something he had going for him. He quickly outgrew his local guitar teachers, and having spent some time driving cab and working in the bush ("ya gotta come loggin', Drew! Money's good, and you can buy an electric piano so we can play gigs together!"), he headed off to California to study guitar with the legendary Vicente Gomez.

"I walk in there, and the first thing I say is, 'hiya, Vince!'. Jeez! He nearly threw me out right there! From then on, it was 'Professor Gomez'!"

I noted that it was one of the first times I'd ever seen him show respect to anyone.

We had this cool idea. We'd come out for a show. I'd sit at the piano, and then he'd come out in his plaid work shirt, battered jeans and cork boots, with his 1957 Fender Stratocaster ... then sit down and blast out this Bach sonatina on the guitar ... then rip into some Chuck Berry.

Of course, that never happened, but it was fun thinking about it. Indeed, we never did play a gig together: the only time I ever recorded anything of his was ...

just about 20 years ago ...

Our on-and-off friendship continued as we both wound up in Victoria in the late 80s, but between his business and my work, we hardly ever got together. Getting together to jam became one of those "one of these days" things. His business went under. He seemed to get his head together and find companionship with a motorcycle club that consisted mainly of older people who just wanted to head out on the highway. It looked like he was going to come through this crisis OK.

And then came the phone call.

"Drew, it's Shirley," his mom said. "Peter committed suicide last night."

I'll spare you the details.

Shirley paid for a recording session so I could lay down some of the songs Pete and I had written over the years. My friend Patrick sat in on bass and a session guy filled in on an electronic drum kit; significantly, there was no guitar track. I was able to find a tape Pete had recorded, and we mixed that in with one of his songs. We scattered his ashes around a Douglas fir in Mount Douglas Park and every so often I'd go back and visit the spot -- finding where some of his ashes were still visible.

Unlike George Harrison's rush to the studio after John Lennon was murdered, it took Elton John a few years to come up with "Empty Garden", which is one of my two favorite songs of EJ's ("I Feel Like A Bullet" is the other). Similarly, a "song for Pete" took the better part of two decades to come together.

It started with a riff ... and the lyrics at first sounded like another lost-love piece of tripe: "I can't say that's the way that I thought you would end it/But as they say, that's the way of the world".

Then the lyrics started morphing into something about suicide, and I realized that this was the "song for Pete" ... I titled it, "To Whom It May Concern ..." A little blue-eyed reggae, if you can imagine that ...

During Worship at Gospel Mission on Saturday night, I threw it in -- both as a message to others and a tribute to Peter. I told the guys it was a bit of "self-indulgence", but doggone it, some were reading the lyrics and trying to sing along, anyway ... and as it cross-faded into "Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus", I heard the Lord say, "you can let him go now".

And a couple of songs later, I heard Him say something else. "Peter's life is not wasted. He encouraged you, influenced you -- and turned you onto Me as Salvation for anyone. This whole Worship service is his legacy."

At last, I've let him go ... not grieving any more, so much as revelling in the myriad ways we influence one another. As Shakespeare's Mark Antony said, "the good [men do] is oft interred with their bones". Pete's music was the exception to that rule; let's work to make sure that our lives are, too.

There's no way you can say it's what the Father intended

Life is His, all alone, to give and return

There's no way you can say that I thought you would end it

But as they say, that's the way of the world.

"That guy positively GLOWED!"

Confess your faults, one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual, fervent prayer of the righteous man availeth much.

-- James 5:16

In sermons both at Gospel Mission and at Westpointe Christian Centre, where I have fellowship on Sundays, the recurring theme has been evangelism and the necessity to pray for others. The words of Jesus' brother (well, half-brother, anyway) are key: we have to go to one another and humble ourselves to recognize our own faults, speak them out and pray for healing; doing so in agreement because Jesus promises that if two or more are gathered in His Name, He'll be there with us. Calling Jesus into the situation guarantees the healing that we need.

One of the interesting things about The Lord's Rain is that, being a street-level outreach without overt preaching, people come in who wouldn't ordinarily set foot in a church. But since it's impossible to hide the light of Christ under a bushel, many of these people also have a measure of faith in God and Jesus Christ, but for one reason or another, are more comfortable talking about it in the less "formal" setting of The Lord's Rain.

Saturday morning, a man came in whom I hadn't seen before. He needed to talk, and so we did: he'd fallen back into a crack habit after being clean for six years, and was trying to pull out. "I haven't used in six hours now," he said, "but I don't know if I can make it. I'm starting to think thoughts that are not me. I'm thinking of hurting someone ... or robbing a bank ... that's not me, man!"

He had been a Baptist youth pastor in years gone by. He explained that, in his recent fall, he'd burned all his bridges with others in the world -- or so he thought. So we prayed together for healing, for answers, for clear direction. It was obvious that he needed to get into detox and rehab ... and fast.

We called Triage, which is a first-level social service group, and since they usually have no beds (one of the earliest entries after the opening of The Lord's Rain tells you something about their lack of space but abundance of compassion), we prayed over the phone call and asked God for favor. This time, they actually had a bed for Terry, so he hustled off to Triage -- and new hope.

Yesterday (Wednesday), he called me to say he had been accepted for Union Gospel Mission's six-month rehab program, and so we keep praying for God's grace and mercy -- and strength. A true desire to be clean, and knowing where to turn to get that strength (recognizing that we humans are hopelessly feeble creatures without Him), is rewarded -- and so is the perseverance that comes with going into a recovery program knowing it's going to be a long haul, not a quick fix.

Then there was Nelson. Nelson has been in before -- totally wrecked on something (probably heroin) -- and he was in no better shape when he came in on Tuesday morning. He spent much of his time slumped over one of the sinks, washing his hands, his face, his hair, over and over again. A shrink would probably have a field day with that imagery. At one point, he fell into a state of incoherent muttering, and then -- as often happens -- would snap back into reality when one of us spoke to him. As I was preparing to leave to go to the office, Shannon, another street person who's been volunteering with us, asked if I would pray over her, especially in light of some trials she's going through with her son (who's 19 and also drug-addicted). I did, and after that was done, Nelson was standing there, looking at us.

"Would you pray for me, too?" he asked.

I laid hands on him and prayed for him: prayed for healing -- the kind of healing God gives, when He reaches past the outward symptoms -- like drug addiction, poverty and loneliness -- and gets to the very root, yanking it out so we can see it, name it and cover it with the blood of Jesus. We all need the courage to face one of our peers and confess our faults, so they can come out into the open and we can hear ourselves talk about them ... and then pray for that healing, as James writes. The prayer over Nelson was for that courage so he can have the breakthrough God wants for him.

The prayer finished. Nelson looked at me and smiled. "Thank you," he said, and left.

"Did you see that?" Shannon said. "He positively GLOWED when you prayed over him!"

"That's God at work," I told her.

We need people willing simply to pray over others in the Downtown East Side. Prayer doesn't cost money ... and doesn't take a holier-than-thou man (or woman) of God: just a willingness to listen and love and see and build on even the slightest improvement in someone's life. Like Terry, fervently desiring to be clean. Or Nelson, positively glowing.