The Cross and the Switchblade

THE THING that constantly amazed me about our workers was that they could have this desire “to burn out for God,” without themselves becoming taut, intense personalities.

I’ve wondered about the reason for this. And I think it’s that the Center has turned out to be just what we hoped it would be: a home. Full of love, subject to a spiritual discipline, heading toward the same common goal, but free.

I’m glad about that. It doesn’t seem likely to me that any true house of God is going to be a drab and somber place. Certainly the Center is no place for the long-of-face. If it isn’t a pillow fight in the girls’ dorm, or a short sheet in the boys’, then it’s sugar in the salt shaker. All the old wheezes.

Of course, I have to frown about this, but no one seems to pay too much attention to me. When I come chasing up the stairs bellowing like a Director that the Lights are Supposed to be Out! there is angelic snoring which lasts just long enough for me to get back downstairs. I would worry about this lack of respect for authority except that discipline really takes care of itself: we keep our young people so busy that there isn’t much energy left for roughhousing. After a few minutes the fun wears thin, and the snoring becomes real.

Unfortunately for decorum, all the horseplay isn’t confined to the college kids and teen-agers. Shortly after Nicky and Gloria arrived, we began what we called Operation Ganglift. Glad Tidings church has a retreat center in upstate New York, a farm called Hidden Valley. During the hottest weeks of summer we asked permission to take a few of the boys from the gangs up to Hidden Valley for a breath of real air. Nicky and his wife came along. Lucky came too. So did a dozen other boys from the Center.

One Friday night, Nicky and Gloria decided to go for an evening stroll before retiring. Lucky and some of the boys called me aside and asked if I’d take part in a practical joke.

“You know Nicky’s never been in the country,” said Lucky, who was an old hand, having been in the country once before. “Will you take one of these candles and come along on a joke?”

Lucky knelt down on the path and held his candle close to the ground. There, in the soft earth, were a series of old cow tracks. Nicky looked close, and sure enough he saw the mysterious, unknown markings in the ground. You could just see the hackles rise on his back. He drew his wife a little closer and asked for a candle.

Suddenly Lucky stood up. “What’s that?” he said. His voice was very low and frightened. He pointed up the path to an object which we could just make out in the moonlight. Sure enough, it looked for all the world like a bear, hunched over in the dark. If I hadn’t known it was an old abandoned school bell silhouetted in the eerie light, I’d have been afraid myself.

This time, when we looked for Nicky, he was crouched beside his wife behind a sycamore tree. The other boys picked up stones and threw them at the bear, calling on Nicky not to be chicken and to come help them.

And with that Nicky and his wife headed back to the farmhouse leaving us overcome with laughter. When we returned we all got busy and made hot chocolate for Nicky and his wife. It took six cups to get the scare out of them.

I think maybe God saw to it, during those first long months of our work at the Center, that we never found a cook. We tried every system under the sun to keep ourselves fed, but the one that never worked out was to have a full-time cook usurp the pantry. A kitchen is always the heart of a home anyhow, and a real cook has a way of chasing you out so that she can get her work done. Thus you are chased from the heart of the home.

The result was a wonderful, chaotic, happy mess. And to understand it you must first understand where the food itself comes from. Like everything else at the Center, we get our food by praying for it. This is one of the projects in which our living-in gang members take a most active role. Each day we pray for food, and the way it comes in is a vivid lesson to boys just learning about faith. People send in a ham, potato chips, fruit, vegetables. Or they send in money not earmarked for a special purpose.

One day, however, the kids awoke and washed and went down to breakfast and there wasn’t anything on the table. By the time I arrived in the office from home, the Center was buzzing with the problem of no food.

“Lord,” I said to myself, “teach us a lesson in faith that will live with us forever.” And aloud, I said, “Let’s make an experiment. Here we are without food for the day, right?”

“Before lunch. How many people do we have here?” I glanced around. The number in the Center was constantly shifting. On that day we could count twenty-five people who would need to be fed. I figured it would cost between thirty and thirty-five dollars to feed that number of people dinner and supper. Others agreed. So we went into the chapel, closed the door, and we all began to pray.

I looked over, mildly annoyed. It seemed to me that this was stretching things a bit. But I had to admit that it would leave us freer to work at other kinds of prayer if we didn’t have to pay so much attention to such basic needs as food.

One of the things about our prayer at the Center is that it tends to be a bit loud. We do pray aloud often, and there is a wonderful freedom in the Spirit that sometimes frightens people who hear it for the first time. They may think it is uncouth, without realizing that we are just expressing our true feelings before God. If we feel concerned, we say so not only with our lips but with the tone of our prayer.

We didn’t even hear when she knocked on the door of the chapel. When finally she opened the door and saw all twenty-five of us on our knees, thanking God for the food He had given us in the past and thanking Him too for the food He would be giving us, somehow, in this emergency, I’m sure she was sorry she had come.

This lady was a little hesitant about coming to the point of her visit. She kept asking questions, but I noticed that the more she found out about what we were doing, the more enthusiastic she became. Finally, she asked about the prayer session. I told her about walking in that morning to discover that we had no food in the house, and about the purpose of the prayer.

“Well,” she said, “that is truly extraordinary. I knew very little about your work. But an hour ago I received a sudden impulse to do something that is completely out of character for me. I felt that I was supposed to empty my piggy bank and bring the contents to you. Now I know the reason.” She reached into her purse.

She placed a white envelope on my desk and with an expression of hope that it would be of some help, she thanked me for showing her our Center, and left. That envelope contained just over thirty-two dollars, exactly the amount we needed to feed ourselves for the rest of the day.

Finding enough money to run the Center was a matter of even greater difficulty. As the time grew closer for our young workers to go back to school, we made a reckoning of what it had cost us to run the Center full swing for the summer. We were astonished at how much cash was involved.

There were monthly mortgage payments, electric bills and food bills, printing bills and transportation bills. There were clothing bills for our street boys, whose clothes we often had to throw away; there were repair bills and plumbing bills and taxes. There were salaries: even the small wages we were paying our workers came to two hundred dollars. The total of all our expenses regularly ran to more than a thousand dollars each week.

And at no time did we have more than just a few dollars in the bank. Usually our balance was less than a hundred dollars. Just as fast as the money came in, we found a pressing need for it. Often I’ve yearned for a financial situation that would allow us to breathe a little more easily. But just as often, I come back to the conviction that the Lord wants us to live this way. It is one of the most demanding requirements of our faith to depend totally on God for the needs of His work. Just as soon as we have a balance in the bank, we’ll stop depending on Him in the day-by-day, hour-by-hour way that we now do, not only for our spiritual needs, but for our physical needs as well.

A lot of it is raised by the teen-agers themselves. All across the country young boys and girls have taken on the challenge of this work. They help support it. They baby-sit, mow lawns, and wash cars. Hundreds and hundreds of them have pledged fifty cents a week to help other teen-agers like themselves. This money comes in pennies at a time and each penny is blessed and appreciated.

Then there are individual churches across the country who have taken us as a missionary concern. Just the other day we had a lady visiting us from Florida. She had read about Teen Challenge Center, but the full impact of the need in this city did not strike her until we walked with her around one block and explained what she was seeing with her own eyes. Here was an alcoholic young girl; there a male prostitute, aged fifteen; here was a boy who could not break his addiction to heroin, there a boy who was simply lonesome. When she got back to her church she stood before the congregation and told what she had seen. “Here I live in comfort, while those kids are out there starving for spiritual help. I, for one, am going to make the Center my personal concern. I hope you will join me. They need every cent they can raise.”

All of these sources, however, could never meet the extraordinary requirements of the Center, such as the original financing of the building that had to be taken on as a crisis, handled as a crisis, and turned over to God.

I had, frankly, simply closed my eyes to the approaching deadline for that large payment. Certainly I had not been putting anything aside toward its payment. We were barely scraping by as it was.