Sunday, February 13, 2011

Testimony Part 5 of 12 Can Alley

Now I am a person of habit and I always jump on the freeway to go from point A to point B. But for some reason I chose to drive back on the frontage road.
As we rounded the corner, there they where, the homeless of Milwaukee. We had found them and that would become the beginning of Can Alley Ministries.

The following Saturday morning we baked up 2 pound of potatoes, put butter and salt on them and wrapped them in aluminum foil and put them in an insulated bag. We grabbed our Gospel of John booklets and we headed down to the recycling depots.
That first day we spoke to one man and discovered that the homeless people get there earlier with their cans to recycle as there is a free lunch on the other side of town that they all try to get to.
Over the following weeks and months we formed a friendship with the men that came down can alley.

Brian was a tool and die maker that made the mistake of going to a bar and commenting on someone’s girlfriend. He was shot in the head and had been on the street ever since.

Bill was part of the group of 3 guys that would always come together and lived under the same bridge. Bill froze to death under that bridge.

Dog and Dumpster were two others, named so because people on the street do not have names.

All of these men had something in common, they all came out of foster care and none of them ever had someone to show them unconditional love.

Our parking lot church grew to a core of 12 men plus our family, all holding hands and praising Jesus.
We use to get some pretty strange looks from the police that patrolled the area and I have to believe that they were saying “what are these clean looking white people doing in this neighborhood”.

We had some amazing success story, one man had been on the street since he returned from Vietnam but he said “because of the love you have shown me I have checked into rehab”, he went on to get a job cleaning Miller Park after the Brewers baseball games.

Another interesting thing happened when we showed up in a blizzard. Now just to be clear this was a freeways closed blizzard, not a snowfall. The owner of the recycling depot had been watching us for months. He walked over to us and said “I have to be here but what are you doing here in this blizzard?” I said “I have to be here to God told me to be here”. That did it for him, he started to share about his family and how his son had fallen in with the wrong crowd. We were able to pray with him and give him some hope. I can’t say that he accepted Christ but the seed was planted that day.

A few weeks later a similar thing happened with one of the loader drivers. He pulled up, jumped out of his loader and began to question what it was that we were doing there. In a similar story to his bosses his son had fallen into drugs and all the trouble that comes along with that. We prayed with him and I have to say that there is something really rewarding about praying with a huge, tattoo cover biker type. Just drives home how God loves us no matter what the outside looks like.

Please come back for part 6 in a couple of days
Also please check out our website Just Love

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