Pastor John Wright

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May 26, 2009

Tuesday night downtown

It was another interesting night downtown. I continue to think and pray about how to be present more thickly as a congregation with the congregation that has grown there in the past years -- in the Salvation Army and, more recently, on the streets. I noticed a building for rent right across from the library (away from the Gas Lamp district). I can't help thinking of the information that Stan Ingersol gave last year that Phineas Bresee, the founder of the Church of the Nazarene in LA, left a mission to plant a congregation because the poor need a congregation more than a specifized mission. I think that is so. It could serve as a place to care for those who have drunk themselves into unconsciousness.

But, besides all that, I was struck tonight by Sean -- a man that Gaelan Gilbert brought to me. Sean desparately needed prayer because he had "hurt" a man last night -- beaten him up and left him in the hospital. Sean was in tears of remorse. He dropped on his knees in front of me, begging me to pray for him for forgiveness as the tears can through his less-than-completely-sober eyes.

We prayed and I absolved him of his sins and blessed him. We talked about his anger, and the fits of rage. He showed me the cigarette burns that he has afflicted on his skin to deal with the psychic pain. He explained that he had not always been this way; but he had served four different tours in the military. He talked to me about how his best friend shoved him out of the way and then was blown up by the mine. He knows the language of post traumatic stress syndrome. Whatever was there before hand, his participation in recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has left him guilty, violent, pained, and isolated. He spoke how he feels the rage rising in him; I gave him a different option of walking -- and we walked around the block. You could feel the anxiety drain from him.

Pray for Sean and all those like him. We knew when the Bush administration conducted the war and the rules of engagement in Iraq that we would encounter those like Sean. The same will happen by the expansion of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These are the living victims of war -- them and those who they victimize, like the elderly man that Sean accosted last night.

War and poverty and alcoholism and dissolution of families and ability to sustain relationships necessary to flourish in life as God's desires -- they are deeply related. The sins of the fathers will be passed onto the generations of those that follow. While the news only speaks of Iraq with the new levels of violence that have arisen, the tragic malformation of human lives, May God hear our prayers for Sean -- and Sean's prayers themselves.

Posted by johnwright at May 26, 2009 9:33 PM

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