God’s Love at Work in Me
Johnny Evans had been coming to the Mission since 1989. He’d get close to graduation and leave. The last time he left though, he didn’t think he was going to make it back.
For 20 years, Johnny battled an addiction to drugs. One day, he was shot and left for dead on the very street he’d walked up and down thousands of times. “I was on life support for three days,” he says. “They took me off and I lived. From then on, Jesus put other things in my mind.”
Johnny left the hospital and came to City Union Mission, where he recovered in our infirmary. “I thank God for the brothers I had on the Christian Life Program. They took care of me; they changed my bandages every day. I had a hole in my back and these guys came down and stuffed gauze in my back. You can’t find too many guys that take care of another man.”
God’s love moving through the hands of broken men — men who at one time used drugs and stole and physically abused others — touched Johnny’s life in an amazing way. “I’m supposed to be gone,” he remembers thinking. “This is my second chance. I said, ‘Lord, I believe you now.’”
April 30, 2004, Johnny graduated the Christian Life Program. Today he works full-time as shelter manager in our Men’s Center, where he does intake interviews for men entering the Mission for the first time and oversees the day room. Johnny feels blessed to have the opportunity to pass on God’s love to men mired in despair.
“I respect them and they respect me,” he says matter of factly. “I let them know I care about them, and what God did for me, He can do for them.”
Inside this issue of The Light, you’ll see how God’s wonderful love, reflected in the acts and prayers of His people, is helping the homeless, the hungry and hurting put the pieces of their lives back together.
