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By Mike Yankoski
I AM going to tell you two of the most powerful
memories that I have.
One comes from high school. I grew up in a great family
with a great home, and I never was in a poverty situation. My parents
provided a lot for me and my younger sister.
My dad is atheistic and my mom is agnostic, and they
depend fully upon themselves – to pull themselves up from their
bootstraps. That is their mentality.
My dad is an incredibly disciplined and driven man. He
was in the United States Marine Corps; he flew planes in Vietnam. One of
the things the Marine Corps taught him was both how to discipline himself,
but also how to turn off his emotions. He can do it better then anybody
I’ve ever met.
I’ve seen my dad cry four times in my whole life.
One was at his mom’s funeral, another was at his dad’s funeral.
And I mean he can just turn it off. So when my dad begins to weep,
something is really, really wrong.
Tears out of nowhere
Midway through high school, I was out for a family
dinner, with my dad on my left and my mom on my right, my younger
sister across the table from me – and out of nowhere, my dad starts
to sob.
You know that feeling you get, when you know that
something is really, really wrong? Well, I had that. I didn’t know
what was going on, but I knew it was awful. Because my dad was crying, and
my dad doesn’t cry – and something is wrong.
I look at him, and I don’t know what’s
happening. And I look at my mom, and my mom starts to cry; and I look
across the table, and my younger sister is starting to cry. And I
didn’t want to be left out of my family, so I start to cry.
Everyone was sitting at the table crying, and I have no
idea why. And I looked over at my dad, and I was like: “Dad what is
it, what happened?”
He said: “You know, I don’t know, I
can’t figure it out, but I am miserable. I don’t understand it.
I have had everything that I have ever wanted. Look at my life, my life is
perfect.
“I mean, I have a great family. I have an awesome
wife and two kids. We have a nice house, and two cars, with a condo in the
mountains we go to vacation at. We take trips around the world. I have
everything I have ever wanted – yet I am miserable.”
Like I said, it seared itself into my mind – so
park that thought.
A couple of years ago I was in New York, New Jersey at
a rescue mission banquet, and I was sitting next to a 75 year old woman
named Lucy, at this very nice dinner.
Over the course of dinner, I said: “Lucy, tell me
about yourself. Who are you? You’re 75, you’re three times as
old as I am, you’ve lived three times as much life. I want to learn
from you; tell me a little bit about yourself.”
She said: “You really want to know?” And I
said “Yeah, tell me, tell me.”
She said: “Okay. Well, when I was 15,
I became a prostitute.” And
I said: “I did not expect the story to start that way. Continue,
please, tell me more.”
Life on the streets
She said: “Yeah, from 15 to 25, I was a
prostitute. I used to sell myself out on the streets every night, so that I
could buy myself the crack that I was addicted to.
“That was for 10 years of my life. But then when
I was 25, a Christian lady moved into an apartment on a street that I used
to walk every night, selling myself. She began reaching out to me and the
other prostitutes.
“At the beginning, we didn’t want anything
to do with this lady. We just cussed her out and told her to go away. We
didn’t want to know about her, we didn’t want to know about
Jesus, we didn’t care.”
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Then one night, Lucy got beat up pretty badly. She had
a broken nose and two black eyes and some broken ribs, and the guy threw
her out of his car. And she landed in front of this lady’s house.
Instead of shutting her blinds and saying “You
see, I told her, I told Lucy this was going to happen,” this woman
opened up her door. She walked down the steps, picked Lucy up and brought
her into her own apartment, and began nursing her back to health. She gave
her a safe place to stay, a safe place to be.
And Lucy said: “Mike, I was lying there on the
couch, and I couldn’t even open my eyes. Yet I knew, I just knew this
woman was loving on me – with a love I just simply didn’t
understand, but wanted to know more about.”
Broken down defences
Lucy said: “You know Mike, it was that
woman’s tangible act of love that brought me to Christ. It’s
what broke down my defences – and I gave my life to Christ.
To make a long story short, this elderly Christian lady
helped Lucy move out of that part of New York, New Jersey to a different
area of the city. She had to find a different job; and Lucy began to do
different employment, and began her walk with Christ.
Five years later, Lucy and a man named Howard got
married. The elderly Christian woman, who had led Lucy to Christ, had
passed away.
Lucy and her husband moved back into that apartment
that the Christian lady had lived in. On the same corner that Lucy gave her
life to Christ, on the same corner that Lucy used to prostitute herself,
just a couple of years before. That was 45 years ago, when Lucy was 30.
Miraculous provision
Lucy said: “You know Mike, it’s amazing to
me – because there are some days where I don’t have enough food
in my pantry to feed me and my husband; and yet I always see him provide
miraculously as he brings people across our paths.”
Everybody knows that if you need anything at all, you
can just go to Lucy’s: if you need a place to stay because you got
evicted from your apartment; if you need food because you’ve run out
of food stamps; if you get beat up and you need some medical attention.
She just said, “Mike, it is amazing to me –
because the more I give away, the more I serve, the more I love, the more I
stop caring for myself, the more alive I become.”
You know, the whole time Lucy is telling me that, I am
remembering back to that conversation, that dinner with my dad, when he was
saying, “I don’t get it, I have everything – and yet
it’s left me empty and miserable.”
Jesus spoke specifically to this. As he said in Mark 8:
35-36: “Whoever seeks to save his life, will lose it. Whoever loses
his life for my sake, and for the gospel, will find it.”
Mike Yankoski is author of Under the Overpass (Multnomah, 2005).
The preceding article was excerpted from a talk he gave at Missions Fest
Vancouver 2009. The author is currently studying at Regent College in
Vancouver.
April 2009
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