The Lord's Rain: Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight!

Once again, a prompt from the Lord pans out! Did I ever doubt it?

Last week, I told you about the front-page story in Metro last week about The Lord's Rain's financial concerns. That was followed with a piece done by Breakfast Television on CityTV, which aired on Thursday.

I didn't see the TV story (and they don't post their stories online), but as for the newspaper item, I do believe the Lord had His hand on Kate Webb's shoulder as she wrote it, because it's brilliant and uses that 200-words-or-fewer format effectively to convey both the financial and the social need.

(Heck, I can't even say "good morning!" in fewer than 200 words!)

And now, the update. In the two days since those stories ran, we received enough donations to keep The Lord's Rain open for several more months! It proves that when more people know about The Lord's Rain and what it means to the people it serves, they will invest willingly. All it takes is a little publicity -- and now, we have an even stronger "hook" for that publicity: testimony from the people who use it. As I said in my last email, it's no longer just a "neat idea", but something that's actually showing positive results.

Give God the glory, working through the media and touching those who see the stories! It's certainly not the first time He has told me to "do what you do for a living: write a news release". The media have stepped up time and again to get the message out, and people have responded. In 2007 and 2008, as we were building the place, they caught the vision and came forward to make it happen; and now it's happening again.

We still have the issue of long-term continuous funding, and to that end, I'm working on a presentation to take to churches and organizations, describing then opportunity to be part of something operating in a mission field in their own back yard. It is a mission field, and a highly important one, at that.

The Lord's Rain celebrated its 5th anniversary on Tuesday (April 30), and support like this means there'll be a 6th anniversary ... and so forth.

Welcome (others) to my world!

On Tuesday morning, as Metro reporter Kate Webb was leaving The Lord's Rain, there was a flurry of two or three conversations going on around me. As is often the case, I was expected to listen/respond to/be part of all of them. I've often said that you don't have to be ADD to minister there, but it helps.

Anyway, I called to Kate as she left, "welcome to my world!"

An issue on the Downtown East Side over the past few months has been just that: welcoming others to their world. It's been cloaked in the protests over businesses opening up shop in the area, and that the claim that the bogeyman  called "gentrification" will drive out poor people from the only homes they can afford. But amid the rhetoric and intimidating and often illegal actions that have accompanied this, has been the notion that "we don't want those kind of people here!" The anti-poverty activists don't want people from wealthier parts of Vancouver to actually see and (horror of horrors!) interact with the locals.

(It's worth noting that a week ago, the Carnegie Community Action Project's "main organizer" and one of the leading activists in this campaign, resigned his position. Vancity Credit Union, one of CRC's main supporters, posted an item on its website about the housing situation on the DTES, and in the final paragraph, it denounces illegal activity. While the newspaper account carefully avoids making a direct connection between the two events, Vancity's statement talks about discussion involving all parties, while rhetoric from the activists pointedly rejects that idea. I can't help wondering if they really want solutions or just a forum to gripe.)

I still believe that one of the benefits of increasing business on the DTES -- especially high-end businesses like Pidgin Restaurant -- is to generate interaction between two sectors of society that have been kept apart. Yet if we're to follow Jesus' teachings that those who have need to reach out to and help those who haven't, interaction is vital. Get to know one another. See how the other half lives. Indeed, action on poverty in New York City wasn't actually taken until Jacob Riis published his groundbreaking book in 1890, presenting photos of the Bowery, Five Points and similar impoverished areas. 

These musings were brought on partly by a blog posting by John Fischer yesterday and a follow-up today, on letting others share our respective worlds. Both are worth reading, but a comment from one of John's readers yesterday (and which inspired today's follow-up) is very incisive.

"Nothing positive happens until we either allow someone into our sphere or we are invited to enter someone else's. Maybe having one's bubble burst isn't such a bad thing after all."

Two words to note in that comment are "allow" and "invited". There has to be willingness on both sides to interact. My experience at The Lord's Rain is that, regardless of the attitude of activist leaders, the people we serve on the DTES are more than willing. And that's very encouraging.

The Lord's Rain at 5: meeting a Basic Human Need

April 30 marks the 5th anniversary of the opening of The Lord's Rain -- the outreach at Gospel Mission that provides showers to people on the Downtown East Side -- and the surprises keep coming.

When the project was first touted back in the fall of 2007, at least one reporter pointed out that it was meeting a Basic Human Need -- namely, to be clean. Certainly, that was the most noticeable thing about the DTES when I first arrived at Rainbow Mission in 2004: the smell of stale urine and BO. How could people live in that filth day after day?

And as we learned in the years since then, people can't. "Street people" or no, they're human like anyone else, and there's a basic need to be clean.

But as I was reflecting on the past five years this morning, something else hit me. The Lord's Rain was not intended to be evangelical, and we definitely do not shove religion at people who walk in. But intent and reality are often two completely different things. (I like to think of Joe Adamson's comment about the Marx Brothers movie, "Duck Soup": "if we could get on the complicated Los Angeles freeway system and, simply by not intending to go to Santa Monica, not go there, 'intent' would be all we'd need."*)

The fact is, people come into The Lord's Rain, and even though they might never set foot in an actual church -- including Gospel Mission -- they still want to talk about God and Jesus. They ask about the Bible. They bounce ideas off us on things they'd read or heard, sometimes years before. They ask for prayer. So, while we may have intended The Lord's Rain to show the Love of Christ through works, we do wind up ministering to them through the Word. Maybe we'll tell them everything is going to be OK; or we might tell them they need to change or re-think what they're doing; but we'll always let them know, either by word or deed or both, that no matter what, God still loves them.

And that's what hit me: The Lord's Rain has been fulfilling another Basic Human Need. At their foundation, people need to know that God has not abandoned them. I think even the hardest-core atheist would feel some sense of relief to hear that message.

On the DTES, you could excuse people for feeling like they've been rejected by society, their families, their friends; a nasty little voice can keep telling them, "you brought this on yourself!"; but if they can be reminded that God is still there and that they're just as worthy of Jesus' sacrifice on the Cross as anybody else, there is still a glimmer of hope in their lives.

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Leah Bolton, the bright young videographer at JoyTV10, has done a piece on the logo contest at The Lord's Rain. You can check it out at www.joytv10.ca/news, where you'll find a selection of videos. Scroll down about half a dozen and you'll find it. The deadline is now a week away (April 30), and prizes include a gift certificate to Army & Navy and tickets to a Vancouver Canadians ballgame.

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Funding is a constant issue for The Lord's Rain, and donations from our usual sources -- individuals, certain churches and the occasional contribution from a corporation or its foundation -- have fallen off lately. Rent, utilities and contingencies come to about $2000.00 a month, which isn't that much -- unless you don't have it. I look at it as 200 people donating $10 a month, and I could do the "Starbucks-onomics" thing and say something like, "that's two lattes a month at Starbucks", but that would be cloyingly simplistic and sound too much like the Public TV begathons I used to do in Seattle.

However ... if you would like to make a donation, please go to www.gospelmission.net for details on donating online. PayPal works really well. Think of it less as "giving away money" and more as investing in people in Vancouver.

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*from Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo, by Joe Adamson.