lord i'm amazed

The sun struggling to break free from behind the clouds

Every Wed night we have a praise night out on the beach at Coney Island with all of the groups that are here. So we have a time of worship, some testimonies, a time of teaching, and then some small group time. Since we do it outdoors there's always the potential for strangers to drop in and for distractions to occur. This past Wed we had some very out of the ordinary exchanges with the locals. In total i believe we interacted with 4, though i'm only going to speak on 2.

As we were closing the night i was talking to the group about prayer. The verse i read to them, the theme verse for my CSM experience, was Ephesians 3:20, which i've talked about before. It reads,
"Now all glory to God! By his mighty power at work within us, he is able to accomplish infinitely more than we would ever dare to ask of hope." I also shared this story:

On Monday as we were going on our prayer tour it looked like it was going to rain. So our group prayed for it to stop. And it did. The next day it was getting kind of hot, so one of my kids, Matt, was like, "i wish it would rain" I did. So we blamed him for the rain and since they were supposed to do the immersion that night i told them that we needed sun. He prayed for sun and the rains stopped.
So then the leader, also named Matt, jokes with student Matt saying, "You pray for rain and God answers. You pray for sun and, again, God answers. Why aren't you praying for bigger things?" To this, student Matt responds, "I am."
When i heard this, i was floored. We could either choose to simply discard this as strange New York weather, or we could believe that maybe God really did answer our prayers. So many times we limit what God can do. Or maybe for one reason or another, we're simply afraid of asking him to move. God is huge, but i don't think we are going to really understand how big he is unless we invite him to show us.

With that i challenged the groups to be praying for big things. And that if we give God the opportunity to work, he's going to show us how powerful he actually is. We closed with the song, From the Inside Out (which we've done every single week so far because the other interns always request it and supposedly one of the groups did today as well). That was a truly amazing time of worship. We were all in one giant circle in the middle of the boardwalk with people singing their hearts out, eyes closed, hand lifted up, focused on God. It was so free.

Right after i finished praying to close the night, a local man steps in. Carlos is very polite, tells us he's sorry for bothering us, and asks us if we can pray for something. One of his friends was murdered a couple weeks ago and he wanted us to pray for Kareem, i believe he said his friend was named. I tell him of course we can and i turn to our group of around 100 and ask for 3 people to pray for Carlos and Kareem. We get the three volunteers and i ask all of us to bring it in tight as we prepare to pray with this man. At this point Carlos begins to talk more about what happened and how he was feeling. Soon he becomes very animated in his speech. The anger at the injustice boils out. He talks about the stereotypes black people face, getting more and more heated as he continues. He sees people walking by that he thinks are staring at him and he starts yelling about how he doesn't care what they think and that he could shoot them if he wanted to. He says something along the lines of 'i'm thinking about sacrificing everything in order to take revenge.'

I really don't know what to say to him. All the groups are in close around us and their presence there makes it that much harder for me to know how to handle the situation. But even though he was getting very angry, and this could be poor judgment on my part but, i never actually felt threatened by him. I was worried about how the kids might react and how their leaders might be perceiving the situation but i just didn't think he was going to actually do anything to us.

At some point i give him the offer to pray for/with him again, but he continues to just talk. Here, one of our group's leaders steps forward. He tells Carlos that tonight he had been praying to God for someone. And that he had no idea it would be Carlos, that even when Carlos entered our circle that he hadn't known it was him (later he would tell me that when he saw Carlos with his big white T he was saying to God that this couldn't be it). But when Carlos began telling his story, the leader knew this was the one. He tells Carlos that we all sympathize with him and his friend and that we are people who care for and love them. He tells Carlos that we don't think the system and the stereotypes are right. We try and pray but it just doesn't seem like Carlos wants to pray with us.

Eventually Carlos simply leaves our circle without ever having allowed us to pray with him over this whole situation. As he walks away he notes that this might be the last time we ever see him again. Letting him walk away from us like that just didn't sit well with me. I can still remember most of what he said to us and i can definitely remember all that i said to him. I wanted that opportunity to pray with him. I wanted him to be able to recognize God and receive the kind of love and peace that only God can give. It never really seemed like he wanted to be there praying with us. It seems like what he needed was just people to talk to. Afterwards some of our people were just talking about how he needed to vent and we were that group that was to allow him that opportunity. Carlos did mention something about how he was glad he had the opportunity to vent because he wasn't sure what he might do to get out that frustration. So though we were unsatisfied with how things ended with him, we hope that we were able to be a light for him during this dark time and that hopefully God did use us to minister to him.

After Carlos leaves, we're all still a bit stunned from the entire exchange. We decide that we need to still spend some time praying for Carlos and his friend. As we're getting ready to pray, there's another man who had joined our circle who speaks up. He asks us if we're about to pray and if he could slide a prayer request in as well. Of course we say sure. He tells us that he just buried his mother today and as he begins to talk he starts crying. So we pray for Carlos and then get to pray with this man as well. This kind of takes me back to the verse i shared earlier this week in my last entry, from Acts 4:23-31, where after praying for boldness and for the Lord's healing power, the Holy Spirit falls and the believers began preaching with boldness.

This is basically what happened. When we prayed for big things God answered us. He allowed us to minister to broken people and then sent his Spirit to us. As we were praying people all over began to weep and you knew that the Holy Spirit was at work within us. God is crazy. You pray for big things and this is what you get. I feel like tonight we got a taste of what the church in Acts was like. I know that lives were touched and seeds were sown. The rest i leave in God's hands and i trust that he is going to continue the work that we got to see a tiny glimpse of this evening.

This is the (brief) article about the death of Carlos' friend. The title "this time he loses gunfight" enraged Carlos.