Yet another ill-prepared night at camp has come and gone. No matter what I do or how early I start preparing to go into camp I always feel like there’s something I’m forgetting. Last time it was the ketchup and mustard, but I brought the hot sauce, this time I forgot all three. There are other things similar that I forget as well, like water or ice or something necessary for our meal, but the more I fail in that area the more I realize that the meal isn’t the real reason we’re going down to the camp. Every single time Dave tells us that it’s not the food that’s important to him when we come, but just the fact that we come to talk and hang out with him. He actually had little packets of hot sauce to use today so my blunder turned into a trivial matter. We did the same thing we always do when we go into camp, we talk about how hot it is and how we’ve all been doing since the last time we all saw each other, we hang out like men like to do. We talked about pretty much everything tonight, from the cricket Dave ate last time, to hunting deer down in Camden Alabama. We cooked the usual, chili dogs served on white bread cooked on the miracle grill that was donated to the camp by our associate pastor. Everything was just like it has always been. This has been getting to me though, in a bad way. I know the reason we’re down there is to show these guys that we love them and that they mean something to us, but I always feel like we should or could be doing more. I don’t want to force the Gospel down anybody’s throat but there’s got to be a time where you bring in the word of God when you’re leading Christian outreach right? I’ve been praying about this lately, even though it’s only been a small part of my prayer time (it needs to become a more important part), it’s still been something on my mind. These are the two questions I’ve been asking God for a while now:
1.) How do I bring up your word in a way that doesn’t look like I’m trying to sell something to these guys?
2.) Should I prepare a lesson just in case something comes up and I do have a chance to share your word?
Until now I haven’t really gotten an answer for either of these so I just persisted in doing what we normally do. I’ve also been praying for an opportunity to read the word and talk about it with the guys there. Well tonight God showed me that I don’t have to say a thing. Towards the end of our meal when it was quieting down the only other houseless man there named Terry needed to go back to his camp and take care of his dogs. As soon as he got up Dave spoke up and said “I’m gonna go and grab my Bible and I want y’all to read it with me.”
Wait… What?!?! Am I not the one who is supposed to say that? God, did he just actually bring up reading your word? Here? Under a bridge?
Dave then walks a few steps over to his tent, dug around for a minute found his bible, and brought it back over to where we were sitting. He handed it to J-Mac and told him to start reading. (Folks, I don’t know if these words are doing this story justice but we went into a homeless camp tonight to eat and hang out and ended up reading God’s word aloud, under a bridge.) We each took turns reading out of Ephesians and then went and read the first five chapters of Revelation. The only reason we stopped is because it got to dark to read any further. We could have read all night and I wouldn’t have cared a bit, and I think Dave would have liked it a lot more than I would have.
There were a lot of good moments tonight but my favorite was while Dave was reading. At one point he stopped and said “Guys I love this, this is church, you only need two people to have church and I got four! I got me a big church!”
As we packed up our stuff to kick rocks for the night Dave told me that he wanted to do this more. So I told him that from now on every time I come to see him I’ll bring my Bible and we can read a little bit each time. I was completely unprepared for that prayer to be answered tonight. Funny how God’s into that sort of thing.
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