Friends Point Us Home

Good Morning. 

I had never seen him before . . . maybe he had been there, or maybe he hadn’t.  His name was Archie.  ‘What do you need God to do for you today?’ I asked my Long Beach street friends as I do each Friday.  Archie raised his hand, and urgently said, ‘I want to get home to my family, but it takes all I make on my job just to get by—I just don’t have enough to pay for transportation to get home.’  ‘Where’s home, Archie?’ ‘Arizona, Ma’am.’  I asked a friend of mine in the back of the room to pray for Archie; I realized I kinda’ put him on the spot by asking him to pray right then right there . . . but he did it, and it was cool.  Yeah, Marco who had made the trek from my town to be with these folks, prayed for Archie, and it made a personal impact on Marco.  Archie just wanted to get home, but he needed help.  Hmmm…. Marco not only prayed for Archie, can you believe it, he was willing to pay to get him home!

If you’ve been following these briefings on the Downtown Prayer Meeting, you probably wonder if the Duke of Earl was there . . . he was.  People come and go weekly; sometimes, absence is a good thing—‘means they got a job or a place to live, but sometimes its not.  Anyways, he was there.  I had prepared a written lesson on what it might have been like to be Jesus’ sibling… and entertained such thoughts as, ‘when he smacked his thumb with a hammer, did he yell?’  John 17.5 tells us that Jesus’ brothers didn’t believe in him; that must have been really hard on Jesus, particularly as he launched his earthly ministry.  Oh, they eventually believed---after the Resurrection.  Take James, who has a wonderfully practical five-chapter book in the New Testament—he started his book by identifying himself as a ‘servant of Jesus Christ’.  Dang!  Something happened to him; that something was the resurrection.  So we talked about these different variables, and I could tell I had the Duke’s rapt attention.  He politely raised one finger with a question, ‘When did Jesus know he was God?  Do you think he told his brothers then?’  That blew the discussion wide open.  Fascinating.

After, the Duke came up and asked, ‘Am I doing better?’  ‘What do you mean?’  ‘You know…participating?’  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘and you have valuable things to say . . . people listen to you.’  ‘Something’s happening to me,’ he said, with kind of far-off look on his face.  ‘I’m changing.  Do you think I could talk to you a minute?’  So we stepped outside. 

‘Duke, somebody raised you to know God, who was it?’  ‘My mother and my grandmother, back in Illinois… it was prophesied over me that I would be a preacher.’  He stood silent, just thinking.  ‘I’m a Jonah, you know,’ and I instantly knew he meant that he was running from God.  ‘I’ve done a pretty good job staying away, and then you came along… and now something’s happening—he’s trapping me.’  ‘Duke, he’s not trapping you; God is coming after you, because he loves you and he wants you back.  He wants you to live out the purpose he has in mind for you.’  ‘Yeah, all right, I guess that’s the spiritual way to say it.’  ‘So are you going to just keep running?  Are you?’  ‘I don’t know, I guess I’m afraid I just can’t do it…what if I can’t do it?’  By that, he meant he was afraid he couldn’t stay faithful, and he knew better than to play around with God.   ‘You can do it, Duke.  One day at a time, you can do it--with God’s help, by God’s grace.  And I think whoever spoke that prophecy over you years ago was right; you are meant to be a preacher.’ 

            Please, my friends, pray that the Duke of Earl will listen to the

            wooing of the Holy Spirit who wants him back.

I think just maybe I’m the friend who is pointing him back to his true home.

After that, I went to jail.  Robby, busted for ‘possession with intent’ was locked up in Los Angeles Central, and I wanted to see him.  One of my main men, Ricky, went with me to the Twin Towers, which house 6300 men (by the way, I changed his and Robby’s names while talking about them here) Apparently, the ride was the point of the whole thing . . . I learned so much about Rick and the street—even the ‘code’ on the street.  Part of that code includes honoring your friends.  Here’s what I mean:  at the jail, after they ran our drivers’ licenses, we were waiting to be called to the visiting room.  Ricky leaned over and quietly said, ‘now if they call me up by myself, it means they are going to lock me up.’  My eyes must have gotten big because he said, ‘now don’t worry—I’ll be out by Monday.  I’ll give you the key to my locker, you take my wallet and phone.  See I got a couple tickets a few years back, and I’m not sure if I paid ‘em—since I have some priors they might put me in.’   NOW, here’s a real friend.  Ricky knew incarceration was a possibility, and yet out of love and concern for his friend, he risked himself.  Proverbs says, ‘there is a friend that sticks closer than a brother.’1  I guess Ricky is that kinda friend.  Man, oh man.   He wants Robby back on track with the law, with the Lord.  Nothing else mattered more that day.  We didn’t even get to see Robby; he was in urgent care. 

But I learned about friends who truly love.

Jesus is that kind of a friend.  A friend who loved enough to lay down his life for his friends.2   

Jesus did it to point his friends to their true home. 

    Marco prayed that Archie would get home, and would help him

        the Duke of Earl is feeling the pull of his Father to come home,

            Ricky let Robby know he would be there for him when he got home. 

Friends point their brothers home.

Christine