The Lord's Rain at 3

My God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory. (Philippians 4:19)

  

On Saturday (April 30), we marked our third anniversary of the opening of The Lord's Rain. I remember it well, partly because Amelia and I had just returned from a day trip to Seattle the night before. (The UBC Thunderbirds baseball team was playing an exhibition game against the University of Washington and I was doing the play-by-play for the webcast: my friend, Thor Tolo, and I had to vamp through three long rain delays while Amelia shivered off in one corner. Then we drove back to Vancouver through driving rain and at times sleet. Typical baseball weather, in other words.)

We flung the door open at 7am and waited for the thundering herd to arrive. It didn't. Some people saw we had free coffee and came in, said "cool" and moved on. Finally, a construction worker named Tim Doxlator said he'd take advantage of the service, and then a woman by the street name of "Little One" became the first woman to shower-up there.

On Saturday, we recorded our 1,800th shower.

  

No matter what you're doing in life, it's good, every so often, to look back on just how far we've come, rather than how far there is to go. Many Christians bent on Leading People To The Lord tend to focus on how much more a person has to do to 'get right with God', which often fogs up the reality that the person in question has probably come an exceptionally long way simply by opening his or her ears to the possibility that there's another way to live. Moses did that with the Israelites as they were about to cross into the Promised Land: reviewed the 40-year journey out of Egypt with the theme that "God has brought us this far, He's not going to drop us now."

As well, the quote from Philippians up there came back to me this morning as I was thinking about the past three years -- 3-1/2, in fact, going back to the day we signed the rental papers and started work. Some years ago, I was meditating on that passage and the Lord said, "look at the word order". The passage does not say, "my God shall supply, according to His riches in glory, all your need." Now -- and this could be like trying to catch a grounder on a gravel field so stay with me here -- "according to," when used in the title of the Gospels, means "as defined by". So what if we considered that passage to mean, "God will supply all your need as defined by His riches in glory"?

In other words, the passage goes from simply meaning, "God ain't broke and if you're faithful He'll take care of you," to "God will define what you need by His riches in glory and then provide for it."

 

I know - you think I've really lost it: that week in the Florida sunshine did something to my brain. But doesn't Jesus say that our Heavenly Father knows what we need before we ask Him? Often, our problem is that we ask Him for what we think we "need," rather than letting Him define it for us.

 

Trust me: it works. It certainly did in the case of The Lord's Rain. God defined a need -- also known as putting something on our hearts -- and then provided for it.

The origins of The Lord's Rain actually go back to the 1950s. That was when Jim Bromley bought the two-story brick pile at 325-327-331 Carrall Street, where Gospel Mission had been located on the upper floor since the 40s (when the Mission was founded in 1929 it was kitty-corner on Hastings, next to the late-lamented The Only Seafood Restaurant). I've never met Mr Bromley so I don't know his spiritual background, but he obviously likes us because he's essentially kept the rent as-is since the 70s, if not longer. We've truly been blessed to have such a landlord, and our "silent partner" relationship came into play when we approached Mr Bromley's son, Greg, who now manages the property, with what was, at the time, a "neat idea".

A dozen years or so ago, Gerry Wall, the senior pastor at The Oasis, spoke a prophecy over Barry Babcook. He said that Gospel Mission was going to expand its influence and its reach beyond that "upper room". How that was going to happen and what it was going to look like was not spelled out, but prophecies are like that: they'll give a glimpse of what God has in mind - just enough to make you go "OK, let's see how this plays out," and stay close to God in one's own dealings.

Nearly 10 years ago, with my life going through a period of deconstruction and reconstruction, I went to The Oasis, which is about a 15-minute drive over logging roads outside Duncan, along the Cowichan River.

In fall of 2007, Lee Grady, then editor of Charisma magazine, spoke at Westpointe Christian Centre, where I had been attending for about a year and a half. He asked for people who were doing missionary work to come up and he would speak prophecies over them. I went up with them. His prophecy over me was that God was about to send me on a journey, in which I would receive new and sharper "axe heads" for the work on the Downtown East Side. "Up till now," he said, "your axe has been bouncing off the tree; these will help you start to cut through."

 

He had no way of knowing I was about to leave for New York.

In New York, I visited the Bowery Mission and saw they provided showers for "street people" three times a week -- one time for women only. That notion floated around in my head -- along with a lot of other things from the trip that indicated the prophecy was coming to pass -- and a couple of weeks after I got back, I told Amelia about the apparent need for a similar program on the Downtown East Side. We had both been struck by the way the guys who came in were filthy -- and wanted to get clean. But without space to install the showers (and the floor of the 1888 building might not take the weight anyway), it was simply a "neat idea".

 

Except that less than 2 hours later, we learned that one of the ground floor spaces had become vacant.

You probably know the rest of the story, but it bears repeating in bullet form just to remind ourselves:

• Greg Bromley agreed to hold off renting the space for 2 weeks so we could work out a plan to fund and build the project. If he hadn't -- a throwback to the good relationship we'd had with him and his father over the previous 50 years -- The Lord's Rain would have remained a "neat idea".
• We had started with Zero dollars to go to this project, and agreed that, if God was truly going to bless the project and make it happen, the money we needed would be provided: and if not, it would go back to being a "neat idea" -- for someone else to pursue.
• 2 days before the deadline, two phone calls came, pledging enough money to get the project started. "We'll take that as a 'yes,' Lord."
• Another significant root of The Lord's Rain goes back to 1992, when I was working in radio in Victoria. Andrew Sheret, Ltd., a plumbing and bath supply company, was celebrating its 100th anniversary with a gala banquet, and the account executive who handled their advertising on our station approached me to be the MC. The evening went very well. 15 years later, I got one of those "nudges" in the Spirit to give them a call. They remembered me. "Can you give us a discount?" I asked. "We'll give you the showers," said president Brian Finlay.
• The Oasis, which has a lot of skilled tradespeople in its congregation, stepped in with a pledge to build the project. Despite the shaky economic situation in the Cowichan Valley, they loaded up vans and a trailer and made the ferry trip three times to get the job done. 
• Others appeared with skills from painting to fundraising to plumbing -- Brodie Collins, who was saved off the street at Gospel Mission over 20 years ago and started his own plumbing and gasfitting business -- and provided just what we needed, just when we needed it.
• Sometimes, it was humorous. Kathy Kinahan, who was working at Nokia at the time, kept pushing the company to come through with some bucks, even though it didn't quite fit with the company's vision for corporate social responsibility. Finally, a cheque arrived for $500. The same day, the old toilet in the back broke and had to be replaced. Cost: $500. The new toilet is now known as the Nokia Toilet. One of Kathy's colleagues suggested making a poster with a photo of the toilet with a cell phone floating in it. Oddly enough, the idea didn't fly.
• The media played a huge role. Jen Palma (Global) and Kyle Donaldson (CityTV) covered the construction; Al Siebring wrote about the Duncan connection in his Cow Valley paper, and Cheryl Rossi and Sandra Thomas wrote about the project in the Vancouver Courier.
• Further confirmation that this was God's Project and nothing was going to get in His way ("the Lord of Hosts hath spoken it, and who shall disannul it?"): due to a stupid mistake on my part, the door to the project was left unlocked. Someone walked in and took a load of plumbing tools. After beating myself up for about an hour, I was prompted to send out a news release, stating that the project would continue despite the "setback". CTV did a story -- Peter Grainger reported not on the theft, but on the project, and added word of the theft almost as an afterthought. Anchor Pamela Martin picked up on that point and ad-libbed that it would be nice if someone could help replace those tools. The next morning, came a phone call from a man who'd seen the story and wanted to help -- anonymously. And he did: big time. And continues to do so.
• Some further large donations have come in right when we've taken a stand about something -- like in 2009, when we refused to accept money that had come from provincial gambling revenue; shortly after that, we got a call out of the blue, saying we'd been chosen to receive a large grant.

Whew. Those last two bullets -- and the one about the financial pledges arriving two days before our self-imposed deadline -- really set the tone for The Lord's Rain. It has been an experience in faith-stretching, this is His project, not ours -- although we're the caretakers of it, not unlike the young man who lost his axe-head in the river (2 Kings 6) and Elisha the prophet caused it to float to the surface (the basis of Lee's prophecy). It's an indication, I believe, of how God wants ministry to people on the Downtown East Side and other areas of urban poverty to go to "the next level" -- an overall provision of hope and love that can actually help break people out of the cycle of despair that they're in.

His timing is amazing on so many levels: do you notice that the project came together before the bottom fell out of the global economy in 2008?

Three years and still open.
There's plenty to be grateful for.

Certainly, it hasn't been an easy ride and there are certainly times when it seems like something or someone is pulling out all the stops to prevent it from succeeding. But the fact is, it is a success and will continue to be so. Setbacks and strange things going wrong simply prove the adage that if you're not taking flak, you're not over the target (how many times have I said that?).