faith

An Evening On Skid Row

/ Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

Skid Row is a twelve-block section of downtown Los Angeles with the highest concentration of violent crime on the West Coast. It is home to an estimated 5,000 people who ball up under cardboard boxes and plastic tarps at night. Sirens echo off the buildings, and the streets smell like weed and urine.

I’d show you pictures of it, but I can’t. It was too dark. Literally. I spent Friday night there with about 60 people from the LA Dream Center.

I can’t begin to tell you what a bad idea I thought that was.

But Dream Center teams have been showing up on Skid Row, day after day and every Friday night for years. They have so much street cred with the community, the game is entirely changed – even in the dark with sirens and crack smoke.

“Hey where’d all these white people come from?” I heard someone yell as we milled through the crowd.

“‘Dude, it’s the Dream Center,” somebody yelled back.

“Oh, ok cool.”

The residents of Skid Row trust the Dream Center, so they tell their stories and break your heart. When I finally pushed through the fear of going, I got to look in the eyes of a Vietnamese man who asked if I could get him a new tent, because his was broken. I prayed for a babbling woman in a wheelchair and found some Doritos for a 90-lb woman sleeping under clear plastic on the sidewalk.

Yes, many of them were extremely high and about as broken as a human can be, but they all have eyes and you can look into them; and that changes everything. Then, when they thank you for coming and treating them like humans, well…

But the question looms:

Aren’t we enabling people to be addicts and homeless by feeding them on Skid Row?

It’s a hard question. But many in the Dream Center’s army, who have escaped the cycle of poverty and addiction, will tell you – Jesus can fix this. He does it all the time. Furthermore, as the Apostle Paul told the Romans:

But how can people call for help if they don’t know who to trust? And how can they know who to trust if they haven’t heard of the One who can be trusted? And how can they hear if nobody tells them? And how is anyone going to tell them, unless someone is sent to do it? Rom 10:14-16 The Message

The Dream Center volunteers, who sit on dirty sidewalks and pray for crack smoking homeless people, do it because Christ died to rescue all of us messed-up sinners, and it doesn’t matter how messed up. And if by offering food to a junk-sick homeless woman, The Dream Center can convince her there is a God who loves her and wants to fix her mess, they’ll keep doing it.

After all, to catch fish, you must go fishing.

To support the work of The Los Angeles Dream Center click here.

What To Do When Life Isn’t Working.

/ Erin Kirk / 1 Comment

Last night, a Hispanic girl, maybe 17, wearing baggy jeans got up to speak at the Angelus Temple – the LA Dream Center’s church home.

She was trying not to cry and her hands shook as Pastor Tommy Barnett held her arm. It took her a try or two to get the words out and when she did, her voice broke. Immediately, the place erupted with people hollering encouragement and telling her they loved her and she could do it.

She told us the death of her father devastated her so badly she wound up on a crystal meth spiral and without the Dream Center she wouldn’t be here.

“God is so good,” she said and she walked off the stage.

On Wednesday night, I met with Bob Goff, author of Love Does (more on that later). This gracious and hilarious guy, spent 45 minutes with me, before stepping on stage to encourage the students at Pepperdine University to love people extravagantly.

Bob is dedicated to looking for proof that Jesus is alive, much like a detective dusts for fingerprints. He said, when you deliberately look for Jesus, you find him everywhere.

For many years, I didn’t bother to look for Jesus because I thought I didn’t need to. But when my life began to feel like eating a sleeve of saltine crackers, I decided to look. That’s why I picked up The Bible – even though, at the time, it felt foolish and naive.

Now I’m at the Dream Center, a place that sparkles with Jesus, because much of its leadership is composed of people who came through drugs, and jail and the system. But, just like that brave little sister who spoke last night, they were restored piece by piece by Jesus and the Dream Center’s one-year discipleship program.

The bible calls people like this “trophies of grace” because when you come to Jesus just like you are and he gets you cleaned up and then uses you to clean other people up, you’re a huge prize.

So if trusting Jesus feels silly and naive to you, like it did to me, make a point of looking for his fingerprints. Listen to people who would be dead without him and see if that makes you curious what he’s has planned for you.

Don’t Let Him Shake Your Tree.

/ Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

My husband Sam loves the word addled. Truly, it’s a pretty good word with great synonyms like muzzy, woozy and befuddled.

He doesn’t apply it to me very often, because I’m usually steady. But in preparing to spend all this week serving the urban poor at the LA Dream Center, I was shilly-shallying and futzing around so badly, I thought I might have dementia. I even threw my wallet in the kitchen garbage and walked away with a soggy paper towel in hand. I worried about it to Sam.

“It’s because you’re going to LA to do something you’ve never done and you’re scared,” he said.

He’s right. I’ve never wandered under a bridge to hand out hot food to a homeless person. I’ve never played with neglected kids in a gang-infested urban neighborhood. What am I doing?

I’ll tell you what I’m doing, I’m climbing out on a limb, because that’s where the fruit is, and when you’re a new climber, like me, it’s good to follow the professional climbers. The LA Dream Center, which is the single largest food bank in LA County and serves 40,000 people every month in its 273 ministries, not only climbs to the best fruit, but they pick it and toss it down to everyone else.

The Apostle Paul said, the promises of God all find their yes in Jesus, and I’ve decided there are too many people (Bob Goff, Katie Davis, Matthew Barnett) doing impossible, God-promised things to doubt Jesus’ extravagant yes.

But I don’t want to just pig out on the grace of God until I’m bloated from hoarding it. It’s designed for sharing. Jesus wants me on my feet, darting nimbly through the world as his little cracked-pot, ambassador. As Katie Davis says in her lovely memoir from Uganda, where by age 19 she’d adopted the first six of her 14 orphans, we don’t have to be talented, we just have to be available.

The problem with shouting this manifesto is, the enemy hears it. And when you get halfway out your limb, he starts shaking your tree, hoping you’ll turn back. The devil doesn’t want me learning to serve people like Jesus did, and he sure doesn’t want me telling you how to do it. So he opposes me using the only things he has, anxiety, fear, confusion, rejection etc. The Apostle Paul explains it like this:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Eph 6:12.

Yes, it’s tempting to bail out when I’m anxious and shaky, and can’t hold a coherent thought or keep my wallet out of the trash, but then I think, “bail out to where?” Jesus blew up all the bridges behind me. The only way left is forward.

And in this case, it goes through LA.