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I don’t know how I almost completely forgot one of my favorite stories from downtown last night.

Darren has an assortment of tracts in his bag, and I’ve been giving him a hard time about how many “scary” ones he has in there. Well, there’s mainly two scary designs…one with a bloody crucifix on the front. And the other is also red and just says “Aids and the Blood” in big letters.

But one of the guys, being more bold than me, decides he’s going to hand those out. One of the guys he gave one to, this Asian guy in his 30s or so, takes one look at it and says “I can’t take this” And the bold guy said “its the power of Jesus to transform lives!” And the Asian man replies, “but you don’t understand sir, we’re downtown to *pick up women*, we don’t want to think about Aids right now”. But at this point it may have already been too late to not think about the consequences of the choice he was about to make, you could see it on his face, God’s heart was piercing him with a conviction.

I also tried out an amusing titled new tract that I got, “God’s last name is not DAMN” which seemed to be a great one for some of the downtown crowd types. In fact, one of the first people I gave one of those tracts to starts talking to her friends as she looks at the cover of the tract and walks away “oh my gosh, (my friend) Ed totally needs this!”.

Every week there’s so many funny stories. So many…moments.

So we’re on the corner of 5th and G (across the street from Jimmy Loves), all standing around in a circle praying (this is toward the end of the evening) and then we hear someone yelling out of a car “Who’s the man? Jesus” (the Jesus part really loud) and screaming. So look over to see who’s trying to distract us from praying. Its none other than Nefty and Rich and two of their friends. Big wave. And then “hey we’re praying over here…” “oh sorry”. Every time we go down there we run into someone we know (who wasn’t “with us”), if not several.

And then there’s the characters. This homeless lady asked us for money and Darren was feeling nice and gave her a dollar bill. I asked if we could pray for her. Oh, please. And then after we prayed for her and her daughter she starts totally getting into it and starts praying for us. Then all of a sudden she says “I have to go” runs over to a news-stand, grabs about half of the papers and runs off. Okay what was that? Is she gonna sleep on those? No. She runs over to the trash can down the street and throws them out….then comes back and takes the other half and runs off with them and dumps them in the trash too, and disappears. We’re kind of standing there for a moment dumbfounded trying to figure out exactly what we just saw. Darren thought perhaps she was stealing papers or something. Ken didn’t really say much of anything. And then I see. The label on the news-stand. Its the free “Gay and Lesbian Times” she had taken. And then we just bust up laughing as it comes together what had just happened. That’s hilarious. I don’t think I’ve ever seen THAT before downtown…but there’s always something new to see down there.

And I ran into a co-worker of mine later, and we talked for a little while…he seemed a little surprised that I was downtown to talk to people about Jesus somehow. Like, what, wait, you don’t get paid for this do you? No. I’m down here cuz there’s a lot of people in this world going to hell…

And then there’s the Christians with tracts. Ohmygoodness…they’re EVERYWHERE downtown. And not just our group. Its typical to run into at least 1-2 other Christian groups, usually one of which is from our own church, down there, even if we pick our block (usually somewhere within a one-block radius of 4th and G) and just stay put. There’s guys who stand on corners and preach, people on other corners handing out literature, there’s usually some people who go down there and hold up big signs with messages about Jesus…you never know who you’ll run into…but its kind of like…its a small world every week…we met these three guys (well, two guys and a gal) who were out and it turns out the one guy is married to the lady who used to be the choir worship leader at our chuch way back when…They had some good tracks too, they gave us a few “trade”. Every week seems like there’s a group like them, multiple of them. These guys said they’ve been coming out every weekend for like a year….and this is the first time we’ve hit the same blocks as them? (well, technically, we were off our normal block…)

Its just a funny culture thing of San Diego…I was talking about it with Ken, cuz he’s from L.A….there’s a different spiritual climate in San Diego…street corner evangelists are like a part of life downtown in San Diego….I can’t count how many times people have come up to us to thank us for what we’re doing, and to let us know they think we’re doing a good work. Seriously, at least three times as often as we run into a crazy demon-possessed guys who can’t help but curse any time they hear the name Jesus (we had one of those tonight too).

You know, went down there, wasn’t sure if I’d stay out there long, but I could at least just go to the prayer loft and pray, right? So I parked at Horton. Well, when my parking was up (you only get three hours there before they start dinging you nasty parking fees), I was like, I don’t feel done here, I think God’s got more for me here…so I went to repark…only instead of going counterclockwise out of the parking, I went straight, and around the block clockwise and landed this super-amazing street-parking spot only half a block down from Horton Plaza. God knows what I need too…cuz I’m not sure I would have been up for the walk of parking on Union back to fifth tonight. But the power to be out there doing this stuff…its not me, its Jesus. God’s a good God, if I do say.