It was 12 years ago.  Potluck Sunday at the Hollywood Church of Christ (the church who sent our families out as domestic missionaries).  The preacher at that time, Daniel Rodriguez, had asked us all to invite a friend to the potluck.  Using Jesus’ parable of the Great Banquet in Luke 15, Dan encouraged the church folks to invite people who don’t normally get invited to church parties.  For example, in Jesus’ parable the Master who is preparing a feast tells his servant to “Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.”  Later in the story the servant is even told to “make them come in.”    

So my newly wed wife said to me, “Phil, there’s some guys who look like they live on the streets hanging outside Radio Shack around the corner.  Let’s invite them to the potluck!” 

Nervous, I agreed, and we walked from the church building to go introduce ourselves to three men sitting on the curb.  One was flat on his back, passed out.  One I remember had a very swollen nose.  The other was old and feeble looking and went by the name Hollywood Al.  Hollywood Al and I shook hands – my first time touching someone I had labeled as “homeless”, and therefore feared.  God must have wanted me to overcome all my shock at once.  When I retrieved my hand it was covered in Al’s blood. 

Meredith and I took the three men into the church building and helped them get First Aid and clean up.   I scrubbed my hands.  A lady got really nervous at their presence and wrinkled her nose at the aroma they had brought into the church kitchen.  Boy she watched them like a hawk as they filled their plates with food.  It didn’t help that the passed out guy was now wide awake, incredibly drunk, and began singing his own rendition of the Star Bangled Banner at the top of his lungs.  (“Oh-oh say-ay-ay-ay, can you see-ee-ee-ee-ee, BYYYYYYYYYYYY the dawn’s early liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight….”)  I thought the lady was going to blow a gasket. 

That day was a beautiful day.  Friendships were formed.  News spread and more men from the streets came to church gatherings in the weeks and years to come.  One man named Kenneth became a brother in Christ and a dear friend, and was baptized there.  Another guy named Thomas liked to sit on the front steps and tell everyone how great the church is for loving people like him.  Today we are still friends with some of these guys. 

My whole perspective was altered from that one handshake and meal.  Something (or someone) that I had previously feared and averted my eyes from became a real person to me, someone I could learn from.  A human worthy of friendship not just my pity or my handouts.  I was forever changed. 

And it began with responding (or rather my wife responding) to a prompting from the Lord.  My wife simply took the Word of God seriously, and together we obeyed.  Fearfully, but we obeyed.  We loved.  My life hasn’t always been this way since.  But that’s what I keep getting called back to, and that’s what I want the rest of my life to be like.

The crowd is growing.  As more and more parents allow their children to be taught these virtues and values, the Bahá’í missionaries have multiplied in number.  Now, as three or four missionaries relate to the kids, one or two missionaries will talk about the Bahá’í Faith with the parents on front porch steps and read from a book containing Bahá’í scripture.  They even brought in a Spanish speaker to talk to Spanish-only parents.  One of the missionaries followed up with my own family by visiting us on another day of the week to drop off a gift for our oldest son with a handwritten note to us the parents, inviting us to come to the next Monday event.

It is so weird to witness this happening.  It’s like someone is holding up a mirror to me.  I’m watching my self when we did activities for the kids and followed up with the parents.  Only now I’m not the one going into someone else’s neighborhood. Others are coming to my neighborhood to evangelize me and my neighbors and convert us to their religion.  As I listen to parents’ mixed reactions to the Bahá’í people’s evangelistic tactics, I’m getting a new perspective on how people probably felt when we have done that sort of thing ourselves.  I don’t like having this mirror held up to me.  It stirs up uneasy feelings in me.

I’ve written about a wandering young man I used to study the Bible with who pops in and out of my life about every 6 to 9 months or so.  I’ll call him Jeremy.  Thursday night he popped back in with a call to my cell phone. 

Jeremy’s not a teenager anymore.  He’s got a kid of his own now.  I asked him how all the homies are doing, but was saddened when he gave tragic reports on each of them. 

A former Hollywood resident, my friend still lives in the LA area but says he can’t visit me in Hollywood anymore because he has too many enemies here.  The last time he was in the neighborhood some of those enemies shot at him, so I suggested we get together in a neighborhood halfway between his and mine next week.  He liked the idea.  Only the Lord knows if it’ll happen.  I really hope so.

Confusion.  Pure confusion.  I spent over four hours with a new Jesus-follower sincerely trying to listen to what was on his heart, and I could not.  Oh, it was so frustrating!!

“This is my friend Felipe.  He’s a missionary,” he says.  Oh great, I think to myself, he just ruined my first impression with these two souls.  I shake hands with them. 

“Oh, a missionary.  Like the Mormons,” one woman replies in Spanish.  A predictable side conversation takes place between them about Mormons abstaining from coffee. They laugh.     

“No, he’s not Mormon, and he’s not an Evangelical either,” my friend further explains. Funny, I’ve never been clear on what exactly an “Evangelical” is, but I always thought I was supposed to fit into that category on the religious surveys.  Apparently, he doesn’t think so.  

“This is an Evangelical…” My neighbor holds his fist to his mouth as if it’s a microphone and does an impression of an angry storefront preacher yelling about how God hates homosexuals and how you can’t be a Christian if you aren’t dressing like the people do in his church.  I make a point that there are lots of Jesus-followers not like this, to which he agrees.

“See, Felipe dresses normal,” he points.  With a serious tone, he says, “His church doesn’t hate people or look down on them.  They like to read the Bible.  I’m going to visit his church and read the Bible with him.  Do you want to read the Bible with us?”

The women decline his offer, but now who’s acting like a missionary!

We also share it in spoken form.  Many people can’t read and even some educated people prefer not to read.  Oral tradition is alive and well in Los Angeles. 

This is one of the reasons I like to tell my kids stories about God from scripture (as well as from my own life) during breakfast and ask them to tell it back to me in their own words.  If they can tell it back to me, and in their own words, then they know it.  They also are more prepared to share their own stories of God with others.   

Yesterday I’m sitting across the table eating lunch with a poor young dad in his early twenties.  “How long have you stopped smoking?” I ask him.  “Ever since my tooth started to hurt,” he says, “It started to crumble in my mouth and I had the worst headaches.”  “What did the dentist say?” I naively ask.  “I can’t afford a dentist, so I pulled it out myself with tweezers.”  He opens his mouth to show me his handiwork.  Pretty good job, I remark.  He says he feels much better now.

Looking back, Devon said his curiosity began when he took his sons trick-or-treating at our home.  Right away Ed, Katie, Meri and I invited them to come to our Halloween party where we were playing children’s games and serving popcorn and apple cider.  They knocked on many doors that night to trick-or-treat, but Devon got the feeling we are “good people to be around.”  From that simple interaction a mutual friendship began, in which we played and ate meals together, listened to each other’s stories, and introduced spiritual topics of conversation.  Meanwhile, we’ve been praying and fasting, and asking others to pray, too, for Devon and his household.  Then something mysterious and beyond our control began to happen in their hearts.  Now Devon has demonstrated a desire to expose himself and his family to the Word of God.     

Please keep Devon and his family in your prayers…

Inside the man’s apartment is a tiny old woman, praying, always praying for her lost son.  The pages of her Bible are frayed from thorough reading.  Worried sick, she verbally beats him down by reading highlighted scriptures that condemn him for drinking too much and doing drugs.  He whines at her to stop telling him things he already knows.  “I know I’m sinning.  I want to stop.  I know I need the Lord,” he complains to me. “He never listens.  El Diablo is in him,” she complains to me.

In his hands, the bottle is a taskmaster, controlling and condemning him.  In her hands, the Bible is a tool for controlling and condemning him.  Look at the mother’s face and you see the worry lines the son has put on her.  Look at the son’s demeanor and you see the spiritual scars the mother has inflicted on him.  Both have abused.  Both need to be liberated.  God, come to the rescue!