Thursday, July 3, 2008

more excitement at coney island

The day after our praise night experience we went back to Coney Island to serve at a ministry site there. A couple hours in our group was divided with about half of us upstairs in the mission helping out with various tasks and the other half downstairs either towards the entrance of the mission or outside on the street talking to people. Some guy was sleeping across the street and when he woke up apparently his wallet had been stolen. Dude was drunk and maybe worse and came over towards the mission thinking one of us had to have known what happened. Somewhere during his search he becomes angry and violent, entering our building and punches this old chinese man. Gives him a nice black eye. Soon after he hits one of my boys on the eye as well. I'm upstairs during all of this but my kids come over to tell me that my boy just got hit. This is when i hear that a chinese man had been hit as well. I run downstairs and i hear a lot of shouting. Everyone has heard what happened and the pastor has everybody come into the mission and locks the door. Outside the gate i see a man who i presume is mr violent. When i walk upstairs i notice one of my girls is crying. I find out the guy had hit her on the back of her head. I go check on my boy and he's got a little cut on his eye and it's bleeding. By now the mission leaders have already called the cops. A couple minutes later someone yells that the cops are here. We head downstairs and we see 6 cops handcuffing the dude. The cops ask to talk to our kids because they were assaulted.

The Chinese man, Mr. Wong, decides to press charges. And now the officers are asking us if our kids want to press charges as well. It seems like both our kids don't want to. And at first, my girl says no, that she doesn't. But the cops are basically like i don't understand why you wouldn't and start pressuring her to do so. We take a long time. We stall a ton. Finally it seems like we're about to just say no when another officer walks into our group and says "this isn't the first time he's done something like this." Immediately our boy says, okay i'll do it. And soon after the girl concedes as well. I don't think either decision would have necessarily been better than the other, like i would have supported them no matter what they chose to do. But the one thing i was saying was that i would only want to press charges if they wanted to. I don't know if that cop was telling the truth, my gut tells me he wasn't. But anyway, that's the clincher for our two kids. And we move forward with it. Later the CSM higher ups would tell us that we made the right decision.

As the whole thing was going down the leader of the group was downstairs with them. After the boy got hit he tried to step in. He tells me afterwards that he was sure he was going to get wailed on. The guy was pretty big too. I actually heard from one of the ministry leaders that apparently some guy had been downstairs yelling at mr violent things like, "Why don't you try and hit me if you're so tough." I conclude this had to have been my leader to i ask him about it. He tells me that the guy had started getting violent with him. That the guy had even taken a swing but had stopped for some reason. He told me he flinched hardcore when this happened. But then that some little bald guy came up next to him and was like, "you and me, we can take him!"

This was a crazy experience. Thank God none of the kids were seriously injured and that our leader was safe as well. The amazing thing about this group was that none of them were angry or looking for revenge. They all forgave the man and cared for him, which was why i don't think the kids or their leader wanted to press charges. After the incident both kids were right back trying to serve. They weren't harboring on what had happened and the didn't let it affect their day. Their attitudes were amazing. They looked past the physical violence they received from the man and looked into his heart. They loved the guy and wanted to care for him. I'm sure the only thing they would have wanted to do was to talk to the guy afterwards. The pastor at the ministry site was talking about how now these kids could boast like Paul did when Paul talked about the physical violence he endured for doing the Lord's work.

Afterwards, one of them would say that the experiences from this trip were worth getting hit. What a great attitude. To get hit by a stranger for no good reason and to still love him? Amazing. Only God could take a situation like this and turn it to further bless his people. Glory to God.

Team Danger Zone. (Seriously, it was the name, that's why we kept running into DANGER)