"exciting Enough To Be Contagious"

“Exciting Enough to be Contagious”

Matthew 4:18-22

Early last week I sat in my office and listened, for several hours, to a woman who lives in her van with her 32-year-old son.

She was probably about 50 but looked much older.

She had an extremely low view of herself, and had been abused by every man she had ever been in a relationship with.

She had spent a number of years living in various “tent-cities” in the Chattanooga area.

She told me that, having lived on the streets, she had been raped and left for dead on a number of occasions.

She has very little hope that things will ever get better for her.

She was talking about trying to get into an apartment that was going for $250.00 a month.

She said it was a terrible place with lots of drugs and gangs and violence, but she thought she might be able to afford it.

“What kinds of gangs?” I asked her.

She said that many of the young people are joining up with gangs such as the Aryan Nation and another one called “the Ghosts.”

She said that “the Ghosts” hate black people and gay people, and that the Ghost’s and the Aryan Nation gangs fight with one another and kill one another.

It was a very cold day as I helped get them some food and filled their tank with gasoline.

They would be sleeping, that night, in that beat-up old van with a heater that works—sometimes—if you hit a bump in the road just right, that is.

It can sometimes be quite overwhelming and perplexing when we look and see the many problems, complexities and horrible things going on in the world around us.

But that is the reason I am in the ministry—to try and make a positive difference in this world with my life.

How about you?

Why are you in the ministry?

Why are you a follower of Christ?

Nearly ten years ago, I became the pastor of East Ridge United Methodist Church.

And we spent the first year or so really, really searching for our purpose.

Why had God placed that church in that location at that specific time in history?

We had a small evangelism team which would meet to pray and plan for an hour every week before Wednesday night Bible study.

And once a month that evangelism team would get together on a Saturday morning to knock on doors and take gifts to the people in the homes surrounding the church building.

For example, near Thanksgiving we would ask church members to bake little loaves of sweet bread, wrap them up real nice, and then we would take them door-to-door.

We did the same in December, but with homemade Christmas cookies.

In July, we would fill-up the back of a pick-up truck with cantaloupes and take them to folks.

The second year we did this with the cantaloupes—no one was home.

Here we were with a truck load of cantaloupes and no one to hand them out to.

What were we going to do?

Then, one person mentioned going to a nearby extended stay hotel, called the Superior Creek Lodge, and handing them out there.

When we got to the lodge, I was shocked that all kinds of young people with children came flooding out of the building hungrily grabbing up the cantaloupes.

In talking to folks, I came to find out that this hotel was where they lived.

Up to this point, I’d had no idea that people—whole families lived—full-time for years in run down hotels.

There were about 1,500 people living in the Superior Creek Lodge and within that number—100 to 150 were young children.

When we got back to the church, we looked at one another and said: “God just showed us our mission field!”

In a short-time we had an after-school tutoring, mentoring and feeding program up and running for the children of Superior Creek.

We also started picking up the kids for church and before we knew it we had 30 or so elementary and middle school children—with no parents with them on Sunday mornings.

We re-arranged the way we did everything in order to accommodate the kids.

For instance, adults became shepherds for the children in worship—having certain assigned kids sit with them each week.

Otherwise the place would have been completely out of control.

We totally changed how we did our children’s Sunday school program and we even had a group of church members who would come very early Sunday mornings and make breakfast for the children—most of whom had not had a real meal since lunch on Friday at school.

Soon, we were over at the Superior Creek Lodge helping out the folks nearly every day of the week.

We threw Christmas parties for them, and gave Christmas presents to all the kids.