Street living or grace living?

"I am going back to the streets," he said. I had to stop the converstation right there. I was talking to a gentleman who had come to our church one other time. He was a rough looking character but easy to talk to. He had been sent to leavenworth by a ministry in the mid-west that did a lot of homeless rehabilitation and mecry ministry. He was here to work in one of the ministry's extentions where he could be trained in a a skill.

This was the second time that I had picked him up to come to a Wednesday night service. To my suprise he said this was the last time he would be coming because he was leaving our town. Appearantly, his work conditions were just too much for him. The person he worked with treated him like a servent and the demands were more than he wanted. What instantly concerned me was that I remembered he came here because of the same reason he was now leaving us. The previous post where the ministry placed him had also proved to be too frusterating for him.

After telling me some details about his bad working conditions, he then said he was going back to the streets in another city. I couldn't believe my ears. He was leaving a place of work and shelter for the unsafe, uncertain streets.

He claimed that he was a believer so I told him that since this may be the last time I see him I was going to be blunt with him. Because all I knew for sure was that in his mind the work conditions were bad, this is in essence what I told him:

• You need to stay because it looks like you are fleeing difficult things
• God will put you in the very situations were you have a lesson to learn
• If you responded wrongly to the people who treated you wrongly, you must go and ask for forgiveness for your selfish actions.
• You must learn to live in difficult situations because you will be in them all your life. Learn to master them by the grace of God and you are set.
• If you chaff at being treated like a servent, that only means you don't have a servent heart. Jesus came to serve, not to be served. You can know whether you have servent heart or not by how you respond when you are treated like a servent.

There is one more thing that I wish I had told him. I would have had him answer this question. Will you be able to serve God better where you are now, or on the streets? In this fellow's situatin the answer is clear. The answer to that question is not always clear for all of us but I believe that it is a central question for determining God's will for us. The question demands that we evaluate the the gifts that God has given us, determine where those gifts can best be used, and depend upon the future grace of God to maintain the spiritual and physical resourses to keep serving the kingdom of God.

We all have the tendecy to run from difficulty. But grace teaches us to deny ungodliness (Titus 2:11-12) and the cooresponding selfish desires to flee hard things. Grace teaches us that there are blessings in depending upon a Father who provides all we need in every circumstance.