Am I ready?

It was a hot and muggy summery evening. An almost absent breeze of fresh air made the smells of my surrounding environment so much more pungent. It was my first outreach with the Dream Center and I was feeling excited and yet a little apprehensive at the same time. Was I ready for this? Did I pray enough, was I filled with Faith and the Holy Spirit enough? Was I wearing the right clothes and not looking too much like a tourist? I came to realize that you could never be prepared enough to see what I saw on that first evening at Skid Row.

Some gutters were lined with pools of urine; rats were disappearing in and out of gutter holes, hundreds of people were lining either side of Skid Row, and there were makeshift tents - some made with cardboard, and others, shopping carts, plastic canopies, umbrellas, you name it. People were dressed in clothing I only imagined a third world would see. Groups of people were beat boxing, smoking, drinking, screaming and yelling obscenities. Some were, it seemed, taking drugs right in front of my nose, using needles and turning around so I couldn’t see properly. I was starting to feel overwhelmed and almost a little afraid.

Then on our right, a young lady was being consoled by some of her friends. She was high on drugs, drinking heavily, and not making much sense. It looked like she had had a really rough night. Her T-shirt was dirty and her black pants ripped and showing less than a little modesty. A thought went through my mind and in an instant the feelings of fear and intimidation were replaced by a sharp sense of disgust with satan’s vitriolic ways to heap upon mankind, guilt, shame, fear, a little humiliation, and pain to finally debase, disgrace, demean and turn God’s creation into an ugly mess.

Hoping to give her some sense of worth we were keen to give her a rose. “Hi, we’re with the Dream Center, would you like to accept this rose?” She stopped and looked at my friend and I, then smiled and said, “Oh that’s beautiful, thank you”. She seemed lucid for a little while and attempted to explain her situation. She had had a rough night the night before and said “it was never always like this. I once had a job and everything but then I just got hooked and ended up here. I wanted to go and get a job again but I don’t want to leave my friends here”. We saw her heart and her love for her friends and realized that even though she was living on Skid Row, God was still there. He was still waiting for His daughter and for so many of them to simply just call upon His name and He would answer them. But like so many of them in some way or other got hooked in by satan’s bait and never knew how to get out again. We ended up praying with her and gave her the scripture Jeremiah 29:11 and told her that god has a plan for her, plans to prosper her, not a life to harm her but to give her a hope and a future.

I realized that I couldn’t carry the burden of her pain and suffering, and that Jesus had already done this. All I could do further was to pray for her to understand that God loves her so much, and that He alone is the answer to her freedom from bondage. All God asks of me and from all of us, is to pray - The most powerful tool available to us.