Downtown 3/23/2014

"As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, 'Follow me.'  And he got up and followed him.  And as he sat at dinner in [Matthew's] house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples."  --Matthew 9:9-10

I love this image of outcasts gathering around to be with Jesus (tax collectors were considered traitors for collecting money for the occupying foreign government).  At a place of grace and truth, people willingly gather.  Yesterday this happened to me downtown.  I had prayed on the way down to be a place where the Kingdom of Heaven would break through, I had my own expectations of what might happen, but as usual, something completely unexpected happened.

I remember a couple of years ago picking up some food for a Sunday evening run at the Jack in the Box down on Alameda just off the 10 freeway.  I gave out 2/3rds of the food and a lot of clothes before I even left the parking lot that night.  Sunday I drove over to where I met Arleo last week to see if I could find him.  As I got close to that street I saw a couple of people on the sidewalk at 14th and Paloma.  One of the people called out to me.  It turned out to be Dave Parker who I haven't seen in quite a while.  It turns out he has been in Texas for the last couple of months and just got back into town.  The other person was a woman (I think) who I've helped before.  The last time I saw her, she was with another woman just around the corner from where we were yesterday.  The other woman said they were transgender people at the time.  They also had the bad cough that was going around at the time.  Anyway, that encounter turned out to be similar to yesterday.  As I stood there and gave out food and clothing to these two people, other people started slowly coming by.  Now usually I don't spend a lot of time on one stop, but as I started meeting and talking to more and more people I decided, "Hey, maybe this is exactly where God wants me to be."  I stopped worrying about being on a timetable to get to the next place and decided, "this is it".  It was the first time in almost five years of going downtown that I gave out all the food in one stop!  Lots of clothes were given out and I had a great time meeting these folks.  Dave knew most all of the people that came by.  It was kind of interesting how initially some of the people seemed a little wary of me, but Dave would give me a great introduction and after a moment or two they would open up to me and be thanking me for stopping.  I prayed with most everyone who came by, it was really a place of grace.

Now I was still on kind of a tight schedule.  I was hoping to get back home in time to get to the church service Sunday night where my daughter was singing (by 6 pm).  It was now about a quarter to four in the afternoon and I was on my way to McArthur Park.  I stopped by on the way and prayed in front of the "I am Legion" door and continued on to 'the Park'.  When I got there the very first parking space was available!  After parking I walked back down to the corner of the park where my friends are preaching in Spanish.  I didn't see the usual people there, but there was one man preaching that I had seen before.  After he finished, he handed his microphone and speaker to me and said, "Do you want to preach?"  I haven't done this in quite a while now (about a month or so) and I hadn't really even thought about what I might say, but I decided to just go for it anyway.  I ended up talking about Martha and how she was so upset with her sister that she wasn't helping her get things ready for the dinner they were having when Jesus showed up.  It was the way I felt just a little earlier about wanting to move on from the encounter with Dave and his friends until I decided it was just the place I was supposed to be.  Sometimes we are moving so quickly from one thing in our lives to the next thing that we miss the opportunities God has given us to help others and be helped by others.  How timely to learn the lesson in a real experience and then turn around and give it out to others within the hour.

So despite the 'timetable' I had going into the trip, I was finished within an hour and a half from the time I arrived.  I got to the church on time and enjoyed the service immensely.  Now the service was not a 'normal' type service.  One of the unique features of last night's service was the opportunity to pick a country in the world, be given a short page of information about that country and place a location pin in a large wall map of the world where that country is.  I picked Trinidad and Tobago which is a small group of islands off the northeast coast of South America (Ireland was already taken).  I picked this country because a couple of years ago I received several 'hits' on this blog from that country.  I still wasn't even sure where it was until last night.  However, I still placed a locator pin in the wall map on "Los Angeles" too.  After all, that is my turf!  --Until next time.  John