Oh my gosh. Why would He sit with them? Doesn’t He know what they’ve done? They’re sinners! Doesn’t He know that good people like us don’t associate with people like them?
-Pharisees
“… They that are whole don’t need a physician, but those that are sick… I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I have not called the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
-Jesus
“When the church isn’t for the suffering and broken, then the Church isn’t for Christ.”
-Ann Voskamp
Prayer walking was hot that day. Just like every other day that we had prayer walked. The heat in Nicaragua is an unwavering constant. It’s a heat that permeates through your whole being and just a few minutes in it fatigues your body as if you had been working in it all day. And we were on hour two of prayer walking and still going strong.
I must admit that I had been struggling to concentrate during our walk through the village community on the outskirts of Granada. We had prayed for several families and were beginning to pass out flyers for a Christmas bizarre.
Me and one of my teammates were following the rest of the group, taking up the tail end. As we walked, I heard a loud crash. I glanced ahead. There was shattered glass in the road. A group of young Nicaraguan men were on the sidewalk and one of them had just thrown an empty tequila bottle into the road and was getting ready to throw a shot back.
The group walked around them. Me and my teammate continued to walk past and threw out a quick “Hola” and “Adios”. As we continued to walk, this scene was imprinted in my brain, and I was still trying to process it when one of the men came running up behind us.
This was month 4 in Central America, so my Spanish was the best it had ever been. But it met it’s tough match when this very intoxicated gang member started slurring his words at me and my teammate. Through the jumble, I could make out, “Will you pray for my friend??”
He was taken aback when I excitedly said, “Yes!”
He was silent for a second before he continued, “Really??”
“Yes!” I said again.
We called the other members of our prayer group together and thus began the long hour and a half Spanglish street evangelism session with these drunk Nicaraguan gang members.
The one who had ran after us was the oldest of the group, maybe in his upper 20s, lower 30s. The others were very young, maybe 17 to lower 20s. They all wore bandanas around their arms. This wasn’t so much a gang sign, as an attempt to cover up the marks from shooting up drugs. Below the bandanas were countless jagged lines, and when I say countless, I mean, scars on top of scars.
Cutting.
One of the boys had scars all up and down his arms and even a half dozen on his neck, dancing so closely to his jugular that the nurse in me began to cringe. This same boy also had wide open wounds on his left arm from where he had clearly just recently taken a knife to, not more than a few hours before.
They began asking us questions and we began to share the Gospel with them. The younger ones were quiet but listened intently. The older one, who was much more intoxicated than the rest, did most of the talking and asking, which at times went in circles.
But I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more alive and awake than I did there in that moment on that sidewalk in Nicaragua in the blazing heat of the day sharing the Gospel with these men. Yes, it went in circles sometimes. No, it wasn’t perfect and elegant from a fancy pulpit on a huge stage.
It was raw.
It was down in the nitty gritty.
It was real.
These men were broken. Wounded- literally. Desperately seeking something more. The older man made a statement at one point, “I want to accept Christ, but I need to get my life right first. God won’t accept me like this.”
My heart broke.
He did not receive Christ that day. We prayed with them, at their request, for their families and their health and to quit drinking. We invited them to the local church and got their phone numbers to follow up.
As we walked away, my heart felt like a 10 ton pile of bricks. If God is not here for the broken, who is He here for? And who on earth told that man that God wouldn’t accept him in his brokenness. The entire reason Jesus came was to rescue those in their deepest, darkest moments of sin and shame.
He came for these men.
And the devil had convinced them that they had to earn their way. But he had also convinced them that they could never do enough to be good enough to earn it. So, essentially, they were convinced they could never be accepted by God.
How common is this lie that the devil has so cleverly crafted?
And how incredibly thick and hard are the walls of shame that he has built to entrap us in it?
But oh, how sweet and how simple, the truth of Jesus Christ.
That He loved us when we were broken and hurting. That He loved us before we ever knew Him. That He died to set us free. Not when we were holy and righteous, because we deserved it; but, when we were dead in our sins, when we had no hope.
He loves us in our brokenness.
“There’s brokenness that’s not about blame. There’s brokenness that makes a canvas for God’s light. There’s brokenness that makes windows straight into souls. Brokenness happens in a soul so the power of God can happen in a soul.”
-Ann Voskamp
“For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:6-8
