Hello dear readers,
We hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas and a happy New Year… It is certainly a joy to finally greet you after such a long time. And of course as always it has been longer than we would have liked… but to be honest, it has not been a very easy few months for us. We have been challenged in many ways as we’ve tried to find the thread of what we were doing with the youth in the church neighborhood before the unexpected wave of kidnappings came sweeping through.
And working with gang members is not easy. But as we’ve tried to think about how to capture what it has been like for us as we’ve continued ministering in the church neighborhood, our thoughts turned to a young man there named Rolando, and we just wanted to share his story with you.
… Rolando had visited our service almost every Sunday for at least two months, though no one in the congregation had ever dreamed of seeing him sober.
Falling down drunk, he usually stumbled into our service about halfway through the sermon, shouting in a loud voice and looking desperately for Larry to see if he could bum a few pesos off of him, though he never could.
Nineteen years old, Rolando had already been in the hospital from a near-heart attack due to alcohol poisoning. In moments of weakness he would often cry to us about his wife and daughter, who had left him a year ago because of his drinking. Sadly, they had given him absolutely no word of where they were going. And as Rolando cried we would always listen, and then encourage him to take refuge in his parents, who were allowing him to stay with them just a few blocks away from our church.
… But strangely enough we noticed that in spite of his parents’ apparent support of him Rolando almost never wanted to go home.
One morning in particular, this young man was too drunk to go to the bathroom by himself. So when he stumbled into the church begging to use the toilet for an “emergency,” Larry decided to help him out, and then insist on taking him home.
By that point Rolando was unable to resist, so Larry put an arm over the young man’s shoulder and promptly “helped” him into the back of our car.
Shortly after we knocked on the door of his house, we saw someone open it and quickly snatch Rolando in. We then saw the door close in our faces, and heard the shouts of women and children crying. We were just wondering what to do when suddenly the door opened again. We saw Rolando on the floor.
It was then that we realized Rolando’s father was beating him up.
Rolando’s mother seemed anxious for us to do something, so we quickly agreed to take the young man back out for a drive in order to prevent his father from calling the police to throw him in jail, where something worse might happen to him.
After about a minute of being in the back seat of our car, Rolando passed out. We weren’t sure if the broken blood vessel in his eye was mainly from the hard liquor, or from the blows to the head he said he’d received from his father… What we did know was that we noticed it on him just after the exchange that had happened behind the closed door.
Checking frequently to make sure that Rolando was still breathing, we drove around for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do. Since he seemed to be relatively stable, we decided to let him sleep for a while and then wake him to see if he would like to check himself in to an alcohol rehabilitation center. When we approached him about the idea hours later, he said that he wanted to talk to his parents first, and so we decided to take him back home and talk to his family. But unfortunately, Rolando’s father was not in agreement, and our efforts to convince him fell totally through.
…Driving away, we felt extremely discouraged.
We were also more than a little worried about Rolando, so we decided to do the only thing we know how to do in order to begin to break the cycle of violence and abuse in a home. We began planning to start a Bible study there.
Now the first couple of Bible studies in this household all turned out to be pretty interesting and about what we’d expected. Not surprisingly, Rolando’s father was the one who wound up being falling down drunk, in addition to several others in attendance (who for the record provided a lot of comic relief, which we will not go in to here…).
And just when we thought our series of Bible studies was starting to take shape, one night we had something happen. It wasn’t until we got home that we realized that Larry’s favorite sweatshirt had been stolen, along with all of the money from a month’s worth of fundraisers for the church.
Now there had been things missing from when we had spent time with Rolando before. Namely, we knew he had once stolen a guitar tuner from Larry – or at least we thought it had been him… since about half an hour later (after we’d bought it back from the guy he’d sold it to), Rolando had actually come back and asked for prayer.
Certainly though, it was much more difficult to secure blame in the current situation. To be sure, we had also noticed several of our things missing which had been stolen from other gang members, but Rolando had always been the one who was most well-known for his stealing.
Even so, nobody had ever taken an amount of money as large as this one.
And unfortunately the greater concern for us in the moment was that Rolando might do real damage to himself, or even overdose, with that kind of money in his hand.
So at the first opportunity we decided to go and talk to him… And gathering our courage, we started walking towards his house, not knowing what we would find there, or in what condition we could expect him to be.
To our surprise, Rolando’s mother answered the door calmly. We went inside and immediately saw that he was sober… sitting by the fire and talking peacefully with his family. When we asked him about the money, he denied ever having taken it, suggesting that another friend of ours had been the one who’d stolen everything… But the accusation seemed odd to us since we hadn’t known the person he blamed to ever take anything.
Not knowing what to do, we decided to continue the Bible study. Certainly, everything that had happened was extremely suspicious. But at the same time we felt we couldn’t compromise the changes we were seeing in Rolando’s life, since he had stopped drinking, and our presence in that household seemed to have stayed the hand of abuse on the part of his father.
Surely enough, not more than a week later we saw God do a total miracle in Rolando’s life.
One afternoon he stopped by the church, sober… and with his wife and daughter on his arm! Shyly, he informed us that they had come back to find him (apparently a total coincidence!) — on their own initiative.
And when Larry began asking Rolando what he thought of the miraculous things that God was doing in his life, all he could do was smile sheepishly. Then he said,
“Tomorrow I’ll give you your sweatshirt back.”
…Now to be honest with you, we haven’t ever seen the sweatshirt again, except for the time another gang member turned up wearing it, but when we asked him, he seemed offended and said “Hey! I paid good money for this thing!”
So of course this all leaves a lot of questions unanswered.
…And what happened to the money is even more of a mystery.
But what we do know for certain is that Rolando didn’t drink with it.
And for a changed life, it’s a small price to pay.