“… lest the beasts of the field …”

Yesterday’s post about the reality check in the neighbourhood of The Mustard Seed got me thinking about the way God eases someone into a position. Sometimes, it’s about favour, and sometimes, it’s about responsibility.

There’s no question that the vibe around The Seed is a much tougher one than around Gospel Mission seven years ago. People were in rough shape there, to be sure, but Fentanyl hadn’t become a “thing” (the cynic in me finds it interesting that the media finally caught on to the problem when children of well-to-do families started “dropping”), and a Naloxone kit had not become the “don’t-leave-home-without-it” necessity; and that scene was tougher than it was around Rainbow Mission, where I spent the better part of three years, just after the Lord called me into that ministry.

“Really … I’m fine …”

The scene at Gospel Mission, Vancouver, ca. 2011

One thing became clear, during my time at Gospel Mission: I wouldn’t have lasted a month there if I’d been put there at the beginning. Rainbow was near to the edge of the Skid Row area — more or less on the border of an older residential part of Vancouver. It was a place to get to know the people and the atmosphere; to shake off my desire to Expound On The Word Of God and learn how to share the Gospel in ways that were relevant to the people in the area. I also learned how to listen, rather than try to offer The Answer to people’s problems.

By the time Rainbow Mission lost its lease and had to close, I was “ready” for the more intense region around Pigeon Park. And without those seven and-a-half years, and time to observe what things had become in Victoria, I could not have made the move to The Seed.

It strikes me as an extension of God’s promise to Moses:

“And the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will be unable to destroy them at once, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you.”

— Deuteronomy 7:22

In other words, if we get all the favour — or all the responsibility — that He has in mind for us, dropped into our laps all at once, we won’t be able to handle it. In the same vein, if I had tried to start ministry at The Mustard Seed now — or, indeed, at Gospel Mission as it was in 2004 — I would have been chewed up and spat out by the situation. In fact, I needed the experience of walking down Granville Mall to get to work in 2004, to start preparing me for the scene at Rainbow Mission.

(I liken it to pro sports: you’re expected to spend some time in the minor leagues, honing your skills, getting ready for pitching over 90 miles an hour. Unless your Robin Yount or Al Kaline, who went straight from high school into the majors, you need that time to develop.)

But God does promise us that, if we’re patient, He knocks down the obstacles to where He wants us to be,

“But the LORD your God will deliver them over to you, and will inflict defeat upon them until they are destroyed.”

— Deuteronomy 7:23

God is a God of order, and the progression He puts us through only makes us stronger and better servants.

New job – and an early wakeup call

It’s a long story, how it happened (I’ll spare you), but I was hired recently as interim Congregational Pastor at The Mustard Seed Street Church and Food Bank in downtown Victoria. It’s a Baptist-run organization that serves the urban poor, of which there are many in Victoria. Despite many attempts at solving the “homelessness problem”, many still live on the streets: some in tents, and some barely covered in a blanket.

The Mustard Seed is on Queen Avenue, in a light-industrial area with warehouses and a bottle-collection depot next door. Last Sunday was my first Sunday on the job, and with the church itself closed and services pre-recorded and online, there was not much to do except get to know the ‘hood.

Some people were hanging out around the Mustard Seed property, and after exchanging some greetings with those people, I wandered around the block to Princess Avenue. There were more tents, and a couple of people in makeshift shelters of shopping carts and nylon tarps. One fellow was sacked-out on a grassy patch behind the sidewalk, covered in a blanket.

Just as I arrived, three pickup trucks from the bylaw enforcement office pulled up, along with a police car and a trash-hauling truck. The bylaw enforcement people — three men and two women — rousted the people out of bed and told them it was time to pack up their tents.

The people being awakened were a bit groggy, possibly from just waking up and probably because they were already into the drugs. One man, who had been sleeping on a grassy patch by the sidewalk, calmly fired up a crack pipe while the others decamped.

“They’re allowed to camp here from 7 to 7,” one of the police officers told me. “If they’re here later than that (it was 8:30 at the time), we just come by and help them move along.”

The first thing that impressed me was the compassion the by-law people showed. The street folk were generally compliant, although one fellow threw a spaz and flung a hubcap at no one in particular. I was reminded of the 1956 docufiction film, “On the Bowery“, which showed life on New York City’s Skid Row*: the contrast was in the way the police would rouse the “bums” sleeping on the sidewalk or a park bench with a sharp kick in the ribs and a “move along, buddy!”.

Some of the junk the people had accumulated was loaded onto the hauling truck and taken away; one woman, named Crystal, had difficulty taking down her tent, and she and the others laughed at the impromptu slapstick act as she fumbled with the connecting rods and the fabric.

As I say, there have been attempts at housing or otherwise accommodating the homeless. A couple of hotels were taken over by government agencies; a tent city was allowed to develop in Beacon Hill Park, but a friend of mine who lives in the area told me he couldn’t walk to work because it was too dangerous. The people who were sleeping on Princess Avenue were there, because none of the shelters would take them due to behaviour issues. “When it becomes a problem for the other people in the shelter,” the cop told me, “they have to go.”

That was in the morning. In the afternoon, I went back to Princess Avenue, and there I saw a completely different scene.

Where do we start? The best place, probably, is with the three guys, passed out on the sidewalk, one of them partly babbling and partly whining. But they only served as a direction sign towards the young woman who was sound asleep in the middle of the road.

She was breathing. And twitching. As I tried to rouse her, another fellow came over.

“She’s OK. She’s got people who love her and are watching out for her.”

“She’s in the roadway!”

“Cars can get by.”

I learned that her name was Brittany, and I went back to trying to get her up. Another shadow appeared behind me and a woman’s voice spoke.

“Come on, Brittany! Let’s get you up.”

Brittany started to move. The woman seemed reasonably lucid, so I introduced myself, then started the job of lifting Brittany and moving her onto the sidewalk.

“Come on, Brittany,” the woman, whose name is Olivia, went on. “This guy’s a pastor at the Mustard Seed and he works his ass off for us. Help him out, OK?”

By then, Brittany was sort-of holding onto me, but her leg was asleep, so we waited until some feeling came back and then walked her to the sidewalk and laid her back down again. The others had hardly moved during all of this.

“They all got some bad stuff,” Olivia explained, “and just dropped — like I did the other night. Some of them got some fenty.”

That would be fentanyl, which is sometimes added to heroin, and has caused countless deaths.

Olivia then spotted some of the little pieces of tin foil on the ground — addicts will heat up the heroin in foil to liquify it so they can inject it — and picked them up. “I might be able to get a bit out of these for myself.”

(Another contrast with “On the Bowery”: there, the men’s addiction is to alcohol, and there’s a scene where they satisfy it by nicking a can of Sterno — jellied alcohol for heating up dishes of food — and squeezing the alcohol out of it into a paper cup. Then they’d share it around. Now, they pick up scraps of tin foil ….)

==

As a wake-up call as to the job at hand with the Mustard Seed, that might have been enough, but there was a second part.

A couple of days later, one of the other pastors came into my office and plopped what looked like a case for eyeglasses on my desk.

“Here’s yours. You might need it.”

It was a Naloxone kit.

Naloxone is the antidote for fentanyl poisoning, if you can get to the person in time. The kit contains two vials of Naloxone and two hypodermic needles. If someone is in danger from the poison, fill one needle and jam it into a muscle area — usually the thigh. If the first one doesn’t work, use the second. Call 9-1-1, of course.

This was something we never even thought of on the Downtown East Side: that danger hadn’t become apparent until after I left.

Welcome to the New World.

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*”On the Bowery” shows a scene in the Bowery Mission, where the idea of building The Lord’s Rain — the showers facility at Gospel Mission — was first planted when I visited the place in 2007.

Memo to fellow Jesus Followers – Part 2

Re: questions re truckers’ convoy

I have just received another communication from a professing Christian, demanding that I support the “freedom convoy” in Ottawa (and other locations around Canada). This time, a pastor in the Fraser Valley has sent a barely literate declaration that GOD has told him that this convoy must be supported.

Add to that a former landlady and TV colleague, who has been vocally supporting the convoy — not to mention a bunch of conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers, and another dear sister in Christ, who has sent me two solicitation emails, asking me to donate to the cause …

Oh, yes: and the fact that since GoFundMe has frozen the donations there, a “Christian” fundraising site called GiveSendGo has stepped in to receive monies to support the terrorizing of downtown Ottawa …

And I have a question for these brothers and sisters in Christ, to wit:

By what Scriptural authority are you acting?

• Matthew 37-40 “love your neighbour as yourself”
• Romans 13:1 “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities … the authorities that exist are appointed by God”
• Titus 3:1 “Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities ….”

Is there a passage I’m unaware of that contradicts any of that, or says, “unless you disagree with them”? Do any of those exhortations come with the proviso that the governing authorities have to be democratically elected? Or that their decrees have to make sense to us?

Is there a passage I’m unaware of that calls us to terrorize people with a show of might and strength — like Goliath, standing tall and fearsome before the Israelites, menacing them with his sheer size — preventing them from going about their daily lives? Or throwing a public temper tantrum that’s attracted bat-sh*t-crazy right-wing loonies from all over the world? Show me those passages, please!

And it’s all because you don’t want to get a vaccination that could prevent your getting sick and jeopardizing your families, or wear a mask to prevent your getting other people sick.

You want to talk about freedom? Read my previous post about what you should do, if your idea of true freedom reaches beyond the end of your nose.