One spring I followed my husband Heath to a local slumtel where homeless and transient people live. Behind each door were hard stories. There were half-clad elderly women who went visiting at midnight, children’s toys scattered among the broken glass and cigarette butts. Heroin addicts breastfed newborns.

Incense coiled from inside the manager’s two-story quarters and voodoo trinkets dangled above the entrance door.

It was a strange place, but the owners kindly let us come and go there freely. We were just looking for someone to love.

So this time we went with the intention to offer free rolls of paper towels and prayer. We hoped someone, anyone, would let us pray for them—but to our surprise, everyone wanted prayer!

Door after door, the guests stepped outside their rooms reaching for our hands, and bowed their heads to pray in Jesus’ Name. They didn’t hold back—they needed healing, jobs, family restoration, peace. Most often they asked for peace. Many times they declined our paper towels but still wanted prayer.

Praying in the front was easy because it’s well lit and visible from the road, but the back section is a courtyard surrounded on all sides with only a narrow concrete entrance. There’s a reason some guests ask for the hidden rooms in the back. All manner of people live there, people Jesus loves.

They all wanted prayer, too. One man named Happy took a paper towel and made a perfect rose for us. As Heath prayed for him, I noticed over his shoulder another man who’d been watching from a distant doorway suddenly walking toward us. He looked like Bob Marley, but with a long beard, tall and intensely spooky—

We felt Jesus’ love for him instantly.

Heath asked if he’d like to pray with us and without hesitating, he replied in a Jamaican-like accent, Yes, ask Him to send de demons away.

So that’s what we prayed, Marley-man, Happy, Heath and I. The joy in moments like that cannot even be conveyed in words.

 

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
 ~ 2 Corinthians 3:17

 

Later when we were leaving we heard someone shouting after us in a familiar island accent, “Keep doing what you ah doing! Keep saving de souls!” It was Marley-man, whose name was Javier, waving his arms and smiling like an old friend.

We weren’t saving any souls, obviously. We were just planting seeds for someone else to come along and water, but we felt so alive getting to tell the Good News about what Jesus has done for everyone!

Seeing that kind of poverty and addiction wrings your heart out, but the look of joy on their faces when we told them God loves them, to get to pray for their needs in Jesus’ Name and offer love with no strings attached…It’s like coming up for air.

There’s a place called Heaven, and we’re citizens of there—witnesses of it.

Our citizenship is in Heaven…

~ Philippians 3:20

 

We who belong to Christ have tasted the goodness of God, and like happy people returning from vacation brimming with descriptions of paradise, our lives should cause souls to long for the “more” the Bible promises…

There is so much more.

Offering an official pardon doesn’t attract those who feel they don’t need pardoned; it draws in criminals and sinners and people like us who know they need forgiveness.

That’s the kindness of the Holy Spirit.

God’s Love reaches down into every place, to everyone, even to those who are suspicious of a God who loves them for no reason at all.

 

It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Now go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.

~ Jesus