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.