THE LORD'S RAIN -- a review

Every so often, it's a good idea to take a step back and review where one is and how one got there. (About a year ago, I preached a sermon called, "It Seemed Like A Bad Idea At The Time," which involved reviewing the things that have "gone wrong" in one's life and realizing that "good" stuff that has happened was actually a result of the "bad" stuff.) With The Lord's Rain, it's important to look back over its history to remind ourselves how God has mandated the project and brought it through all sorts of challenges.

The Lord's Rain is a project we undertook at Gospel Mission in the Fall of 2007, to provide showers to people on Vancouver's Downtown East Side. The whole project has truly been a move of God, with beginnings in a prophecy spoken over our senior Pastor, Barry Babcook, some years back and another spoken over me in September 2007. The word spoken over Barry was that Gospel Mission would expand its influence, reaching out to people on the street; the word over me was that God would start providing me with new ways of reaching people -- and that He would send me on a journey.

The man who spoke the prophecy, Lee Grady, had no earthly way of knowing that I was about to leave on a trip to New York 2 weeks later. That certainly got my attention and opened my mind to these "new ways" while on the trip. I looked in at the Bowery Mission and saw that they have a program to provide showers to people, and I'd been thinking about how the street people could get clean. But we had no place to build showers at the Mission, so it seemed to be just A Neat Idea.

Then we learned that the group which had occupied one of the two ground-floor spaces in our building (Gospel Mission is on the second floor of an old 2-storey walkup) had moved out because they couldn't afford the rent. So Barry asked the landlord if he could give us two weeks to come up with a plan for building and funding the project. He said "yes".

That was really the first sign that God wanted this to go ahead. The landlord is a businessman, and apparently he had at least one prospective renter. But he was willing to put that on hold to give us a chance.

We had $0.00 in the bank for this, so I had to start from square one with the fundraising. I wrote to a prominent Christian businessman, asking if he'd underwrite the project. We were turned down flat. I sent an email to anyone I could think of in my Christian circle of friends and acquaintances. Nada. My home church sent an email to its members.

Two days before the deadline, we had maybe $150 per month in pledges. We estimated that we needed $1500. Then came two phone calls, totalling $4000 in cash. We met the landlord the Saturday, and picked up the keys.

Then the media found out about it and started giving the project exposure. More people started contributing and others stepped forward with offers of help. My former church in Duncan, which has a lot of tradespeople in its congregation, put together a work party, which made three trips to Vancouver to build the sub-floor and frames. As Barry and I discussed where we'd actually get the showers, the Lord spoke to me, "Andrew Sheret".

Andrew Sheret is a bath and plumbing supply company, and in 1992, I MC'd their 100th anniversary dinner at the Empress Hotel in Victoria. I hadn't had any contact with them since, but it was worth a shot. I emailed the president, asking if they could give us a discount on the supplies we needed. He emailed back, saying, essentially "we'll give them to you".

Another sign that the Lord was going to see this through no matter what: the miracle that happened when I made a costly mistake. I thought I'd locked the door to the jobsite, but it turned out I hadn't, and someone walked in and helped himself to some plumbing tools. After beating myself up for a few hours, the Lord told me to do what I do best: write a news release. "People who put their money and time into this have to know that this isn't going to stop it," He said.

Two TV stations picked up on the news release -- which was an upbeat release, stating that we're still going ahead, despite the setback. One of the reporters, CTV's Peter Grainger, very carefully did not turn it into a "whine" festival. Rather, he focused on the vision of the showers project, and only mentioned the theft as almost an afterthought. Then, Pamela Martin picked up on the theft and suggested it'd be nice if people could help replace the tools.

The next day, the phone rang at my home. It was a businessman who didn't want his name used, and whom the Lord had told to help out. I met him at his office and he planked down a roll of bills. "You think $8000 would help?"

There's a passage in the Book of Isaiah, which says, "the Lord of Hosts hath purposed it, and who shall disannul it?" In other words, if God decides something is going to happen, nothing will stop it. The success of The Lord's Rain begins with God's determination that it's what the area needs. It's also due to the fact that it's been conceived, funded, built and supplied by a variety of people bringing their own gifts to the table. It's not the work of a large organization or a single contributor: it's people who care about what's going on in their own city, and want to help in whatever way they can.

The project finally opened its doors April 30, 2008, and to this date, some 9,000 showers have been taken. The place is open 5 early mornings a week (one of those mornings is for women only), plus one midday, and on Sundays, people with disabilities can take part in the Gospel Mission services upstairs via closed-circuit TV.  

The Lord's Rain has been about more than hot water, soap and towels, too. It quickly became a place where people could come for fellowship, free coffee, and a place to escape from the street where they can talk with people who don't judge them. We soft-pedalled the connection with the church upstairs for a while, but it was clear that you couldn't hide that Light under a bushel. People who would never come into a church, would come in and start asking about the Bible, or asking for prayer. Some have started coming to the Gospel Mission services. 

One thing that's become apparent is that people "on the outside" want to support The Lord's Rain. There's so much negative publicity about the Downtown East Side: people see that there's poverty and despair, but they also see and hear activists making wild demands, protesting, occupying private property and essentially trying to shame governments into action -- pointing out there's a problem but demanding that someone else fix it -- with little tangible result. Over and over again, though, we've seen that when people hear about The Lord's Rain and see a project that is more of a hand-up than a hand-out, they get behind it.

We really saw that in the spring of 2013, when funds dried up and it was becoming likely that we'd have to close The Lord's Rain. A reporter with Metro Newspaper -- the free daily paper handed out on the public transit system -- wrote a story, and within a week, enough funds came in to keep the place open for the foreseeable future. Two Foundations stepped up -- one, The 625 Powell Street Foundation -- guaranteed the budget for at least a year (and still hasn't stopped with the support), and the other, The R. Howard Webster Foundation, issued a fund-matching challenge, which led to over $27,000.00 coming in.

I believe it's all an indication that God wants more for His people than feeding programs and emergency shelters: Hope. If they don't have Hope, why should they take the steps needed to get treatment and turn away from the street life?

Where do they find that Hope?  

Jesus tells us that the signs of His presence are: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them. (Matthew 11:5, Luke 7:22) And that's more important than "the world" might say: so many people come into The Lord's Rain -- even though it's not an overtly evangelical operation -- asking for prayer, or asking questions about God and the Bible, and we've realized that we've been providing another Basic Human Need. That's the need to know that God still loves them.

Got Water?

And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward. -- Matt. 10:24

It's hot in Vancouver. I know it sounded silly to the lady from Mississippi whom I met last week - back home, for her, it's up around 100 F with 80% humidity - but here on the left coast, when the temperature hits 30 (upper 80s Fahrenheit), we start to seek out stores with air conditioning.

It's going to be a concern for the homeless and otherwise street people on the Downtown East Side. They don't have as many options for staying hydrated. So this is an appeal to you today: if you could pick up a case of bottled water (London Drugs has them on for $3.99 for a case of 24) and bring it to Gospel Mission, 327 & 331 Carrall Street - (not to be confused with Union Gospel - and they're giving out water, too), we can hand them out both at The Lord's Rain and upstairs.

You probably won't find anyone at The Lord's Rain this afternoon, but come to the church upstairs on Sunday after 12 noon.

When Cigarettes Saved Lives

Let me preface this by saying that I don’t smoke. I grew up in a time when kids who smoked were considered juvenile delinquents, children with whom “good children” (like me) didn’t associate. I pestered my parents until they quit smoking. A relationship fell apart because she smoked and I tried to get her to quit. (She did try, but then, looking for a replacement for the hand-mouth motion associated with smoking, decided to have coffee, instead. She complained of hyperventilating by 11am. This may give some insight into the relationship as a whole.)

(I should point out that I have no use for the current social battle against tobacco use. No, I don’t want people smoking in my air-space, but I’d rather give a smoker the opportunity to be courteous and give myself the option to be gracious, than have some law forcing the issue.)

Anyway, the headline there is not Orwellian newspeak, like many other attempts at justifying the unjustifiable. But a few years ago, I wrote about a Vietnam veteran and his face-to-face encounter with “Charlie Cong” – an enemy soldier – just after the rest of his unit had been wiped out in an ambush. After staring at each other for what seemed like ages, the VC soldier held up two fingers to his mouth. Rudy – the American – realized he was asking for a cigarette. Rudy had some, so they sat together, had a smoke, and communicated as best they could with sign language. The VC soldier showed Rudy photos of his family. They went separate ways, and when Rudy got back to camp, he told his CO he couldn’t kill North Vietnamese anymore.

So I got thinking the other day: what if Rudy and “Charlie” didn’t smoke? What shared social experience would they have had, that would have led to that turning point in their lives? A drink? I doubt either would have had a hip flask or a canteen of water, and would they have shared? What if one was a mean drunk? How about marijuana – the smokable weed that’s apparently exempt from the social convention against smoking? Again, I doubt they would have had any handy.

Also, consider the circumstances: Rudy had just seen his entire unit wiped out. Who knows how many VC were killed in that exchange, but “Charlie” was all alone when it was over, just like Rudy. Smoking would have calmed their nerves, and smoking together broke through the barrier that war imposes, turning the Invading Imperialist American and the Ruthless Jungle Guerrilla into two men, sitting together, chatting.

Rudy was medical’d out within a week after telling his CO that he couldn’t kill “those people”. “Charlie” disappeared into the jungle – who knows what happened to him? Maybe he was killed the next day; maybe he, too, realized he couldn’t kill people and got out of the war and back to his family. We probably couldn’t count the number of people whose lives were saved, because Rudy had a couple of cigarettes that day.