Saturday, September 15, 2007

jesus saves

ive been struggling to write for a while but so much has been going on in my life, bad and good. i just wanted to take the time out of today to write about my experience the other night. friday night a group of about 50 of us gathered at school to go downtown to do the fatboys ministry program. which is where you pretty much bring food and clothes and talk with homeless people. our older friend told us to take off all of our jewelry, all of our makeup, and wear baggy clothes. we met together at the ministry house and divided up into groups by which route we wanted to go on. there were shorter ones, ones where you go into shelters, ones where you go to the heat grates, and so on. me and my two other friend decided to go on the jesus saves route which i guess is the more difficult one. jesus saves is a mission in downtown denver that feeds and gives homeless people a place to stay at night. but after they fill up many homeless people are left outside. we took the vans downtown and we started on our way. we walked for about twenty minutes until we finally got there. our group had about fifteen people so we decided to split up into two groups so it wasnt so overwhelming. when we arrived there we had to stay with a guy so i was with this boy V who is a year older than me, pretty big and protective looking so i guess you could say it was alright.

the first couple people we talked to were pretty friendly. we gave them some food and olnly talked to them for a short amount of time. it was easy to see that many of them were under the influence of drugs and alcohol but i still felt compassion over them. we walked around the corner to where more of our group was. we saw this older man, with a walker, who we talked to for a good amount of time. he told us how he had injured his leg (it really did look like a bad leg). he told us it was from a bull riding accident. he told us how his wife had died in a drunk driving accident about ten years ago, and that one of his sons died in iraq about five months ago. he said he still had two other children though. it is so hard for these type of situations because you cant always tell if they are lying or not, but all you can do is show love to them nonetheless. this man, his name was david by the way, was older and a very slow speaker. it made me realize that i need to work a lot more on my patience. he spoke very slowly and i knew that he had more to say, even if he was quiet for a moment.

after that we headed back to the cars and met up with everyone else. that night was so moving. its definitly something i would like to go back and do again.

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