Good Times & Bad

You never know how something will turn out until you try! In the case of my church we saw a chance to help a couple that was in some major trouble. The man and woman are in their late twenties and he used to be an electrical worker until they both got into the drug and alcohol scene. When the church met them they said they were really trying to come out of that scene but needed some help. Now if you saw my church you would know that financial help wasn't really an option for us so we decided to provide them with a place to stay at the church and in exchange all we asked was that they clean up around the church and map out what was good electrically in the church and what needed to be replaced (the church building in over 60 years old and it did go through a fire and several vandal attacks in the last five years). Anyway, after one week the man left and the woman was going nuts. Several of their friends came by and instead of the church being cleaned up you would think a bomb had exploded inside, what a mess! I told the woman she would have to leave at the end of the month, our church had done all we could do to help and saw nothing but disrespect to both God's house and his people. The next evening the young lady told me she had cried herself to sleep and had begged God to forgive her. Right there and then she accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior and she told me it was like a fog had been lifted from her life... At one time their were five people at the church, they took everything we would give them and did nothing in return. I look back and remember this young woman starting to turn her life around and taking her first few baby steps as a christian. She made enough money doing odd-jobs to buy a bus ticket back to her folks and is now going to school to earn her high school diploma. Yes, my church went through a bad time while trying to help but God gave us a true blessing in the end.