We wake up at 9am and get ready to leave. Chris offers us mouth wash. I’ve never seen any men get as excited about hygiene as we were when we realized we got to use mouthwash. He also offers us the frisbee. On the way out Kurt (he’s out of college and kinda the head of operations at the Decomm House) offers us the house as a “base of operations.” We rejoice in the fact that we have a secure place to stay each night and we leave to make the 45 minute walk to the shelters.

We go by Sunday Breakfast for lunch. Here’s how it works; they offer three meals a day and before lunch and dinner there’s a sermon. We have to sit through 3 of these sermons in all. We are all in shock at the terrible theology, out of context scripture, and just downright piss-poor [unacceptable] presentation of the gospel given by… every “preacher” we hear at these meetings. It’s frustrating. One of the preachers was even homeless himself once, and all he had to present to the fifty men sitting in the room was a terribly communicated presentation of the prosperity gospel.

Despite their terrible teaching and the harm that may be done through that, it is apparent that the people at Sunday Breakfast are trying to serve the homeless community. We ask if we can volunteer to help them in some way and they tell us they will have work for us tomorrow. We go by The Chosen 300 and volunteer our services there too and they also tell us they will have work for us tomorrow.

We walk back into the downtown area Wes decides he wants doughnuts again, so we go back by DD, but they haven’t thrown anything out. So Wes picks up some of the doughnuts from the day before… the ones on the ground… behind the dumpster… that got rained on the night before. No one else touches them… except Vic who is persuaded into taking a bite. Steve and I remark on how impractical this is.

Vic, Steve, and Wes spot a sign saying “DONATE BLOOD, $20″ They get over excited and run with reckless abandon into the building in a manner that makes me think they would sell their kidneys for fifty bucks. They are turned away because only Philadelphia residents can donate.

Photo from http://www.freewebs.com/themeades/

It’s a nice day, so we decide to head into the city, hang out, and see what opportunities God brings up. We decide to lounge around the Plaza around the Municipal Services Building where there is a concrete flat with tons of game pieces like chess pawns, dominoes, and Sorry and Monopoly figures. We take a seat on a giant checker and lay in the sun. The guys throw the frisbee around while I sit down and talk to a womanizing man who talks about how Obama has made it easy for him lie and get hundreds of dollars in disability and food stamps.

After a while I join the guys trowing the disc. A man walks up and asks if he can throw with us. His name is Tom, he has his wife and two twin baby boys in a stroller with him. He joins in, cigarette in one hand, throwing with the other. After a while he asks Steve “do you guys smoke pot?” When Steve replies with a no he immediately states, “oh, then you guys are Christians.” Steve uses the opportunity to open up a few doors and tell him why we’re in the city. After hanging out with him for about an hour he insists that he wants to buy us some food with his food stamps. We argue that he doesn’t need to for about ten minutes but eventually he and his family leave and he tells us to wait where we are because he will be back.

As we sit down, pray, and wait for Tom to return we meet our first apparent bout with spiritual warfare. It comes in a crazy, sixty-something year old black lady named Barbara. She approaches us and begins talking about who knows what. She takes a quick liking to Wesley and makes awkward physical advances on him that are both troubling and hysterical.

After about an hour, Tom returns with some food. Then things heat up. Crazy Barbara becomes loud and insane and Tom tries to be calm but is also being very protective of his boys and increasingly verbally aggressive towards Crazy Barbara. Finally we all agree to pray. Tom asks us to share something from the Word. So Wes begins to read from 2 Corinthians 5:

Since we believe that Christ died for all, we also believe that we have all died to our old life. He died for everyone so that those who receive his new life will no longer live for themselves. Instead, they will live for Christ, who died and was raised for them.

So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ.”

Silence falls over everyone. Tom stares at Wes. There’s something in his eyes. Then the best two lines we heard on our whole trip are spoken.

“Can you read that again?”

Wes does.

“Can you explain that to me?”

We all sit down and Wes begins to walk through God’s plan with Tom and his family.

And the Crazy Barbara becomes insane.

Looking back, this may quite possibly have been demon possession, it was definitely the act of Satan trying to interfere with the Gospel. She is yelling indistinguishably and becoming paranoid about all her surroundings. Vic and I quickly diagnose the situation. Barbara = bad. We have to get her away from Tom and his kids. So Vic and I seclude Insane Barbara and walk her away from where Steve and Wes are walking Tom through the idea of sin and redemption. I would like to be over there with them. But I learn a very important lesson dealing with Insane Barbara: as a minister of the Gospel, dealing with the wolves is just as important as tending to the sheep.

After Wes and Steve are done we pray and we walk away from Insane Barbara with Tom and his family at a brisk pace. We trade phone numbers and agree to call him tomorrow. We go to Sunday Breakfast, listened to some more terrible “preaching” and fellowshiped with our brothers. Some of the guys asked us where we had been staying, when we told them we had been staying on a college campus, Bill thought it was hilarious. He was happy for us but acknowledged that it was nice to be young because he could never pull it off. Walt became angry and told us we had lost our credibility. The topic of whether Walt was right or not became a topic of debate between the four of us for the rest of the week. Afterward we walked back to Temple University, hung out in the abandoned student center, talked theology, and pretty much ministered to each other for a couple of ours.

We decided to walk the town a little more. We were walking back towards the house when we spotted a MacDonalds. We thought it would be a good idea to check the drive through for change… cause you know, when you drop change in the drive through, you’re too lazy to pick it up. As we were about to go fish for pennies a car full of girls drives up and goes into the McDees. We try to convince Wes that if he’ll work some charm, he could get us all double cheeseburgers for free. He refuses, we argue for 10 minutes and finally decide to walk away. As we are leaving I decide you only live (homeless) once (hopefully) so I’m just gonna go beg for food. Steve accompanies me and we go in and strike up and conversation with the group of girls. They are all 23 year old Drexel students, they’re quite friendly and interested in what we’re doing. After a while Vic and Wes (the cowards) come in and sit down. We tell them our story and talk to them for about 15 minutes. As we get up to leave, one of them, Alycia, tells us to take $20 dollars.

I refuse. she insists. Wes says “offer twice.” She does. We get $20.

We walk back to the Decomm House wondering what to do with the money. We decide we’ll spend it tomorrow on Bill somehow. We get back and I watch the end of Lost with Adam. We stay up talking for a while. We go to bed. It was a good day.

• It is very early right now (around 5:30 am). Russ, [Derrick, Kalon,] and I are waiting in the train station now for the train to take us to Washington, D.C. I got a little freaked out this morning because one of the lenses in my glasses popped out. I was afraid I was going to either have to bring my contacts with me or not wear any vision correction at all (not good at all). Fortunately, Russ told me to try to pop the lens back in and it worked. I haven’t been really nervous about the trip until just lately. That’s the way I get. I am fine until the day of or right before some big event. My nerves are calm until I am actually doing whatever it is that I have been planning on doing. After it comes though, I tend to be a nervous wreck.
• It’s about 4 pm right now. We arrived in D.C. and met up with the church at which our emergency contact works (located in Union Station). They were awesome. We got to help the band set up for worship before the services and then tear down afterwards. In between the services, we walked around for a little while just to get used to the city. We met our first homeless friend. His name is Pete AKA “B.I.S.” which stands for something that I can’t remember right now. He is a really crazy and cool homeless guy. He said lots of things that I really didn’t understand, but I’m not really sure if he did either. We hope to speak to him a lot more throughout the week because he stays in the same area all the time.After going back to the church to help tear down, we walked around some more. The church (National Community Church) has an awesome homeless ministry. They invite all of the homeless around the area to come to the services and then have free doughnuts and coffee in between services. They gave us the extra doughnuts and four or five extra bag lunches that they didn’t hand out to the homeless. We decided to walk around the city and hand the doughnuts out as we went. We gave some to a few homeless people outside of Union Station and then the rest to lots of homeless people standing outside of one of the main shelters in D.C. They were waiting outside because the shelter didn’t open until 7 pm that night (it was only around 3 pm at that point). They had to wait outside in the cold and rain. We got to speak with quite a few of them for a pretty long while. We also got to pray with a few of them.

  Afterwards, we headed to George Washington University to try to build some relationships with some people our age and to possibly find a place to stay for the night/ week. We stopped on the way to chow down on our bag lunches. When we arrived at the school, we soon discovered that they were on spring break, the campus is very spread out, and there were few places for the public to hang out on school grounds (we couldn’t locate a student center or places like that). We hung out in the nearby Starbucks for a little while to regain some energy. Afterwards, we headed to NCC’s coffee house called Ebenezer’s to get some free coffee and cookies for their third birthday celebration. We got here too late for the cookies, but we did all get some coffee. We are all sort of concerned about where we will sleep for the night, but we know God will provide according to His will.

• Later on, we headed over to Union Station again. We walked through the food court to get a few free samples for what we expected to be dinner. We sat down in the food court just to chill out a little and pray. We came up with the idea to ask if we could help one of the food places close for the night for their leftovers. Dave proceeded to do so at a pizza place. I told him that if the first place turned us down, I would ask the second place. As he was walking back towards us, he had no expression on his face. We expected this to be a sign of “try again.” When he got back to the table, he informed us that they were going to give us the leftover pizza, and all we had to do was go back at 7 pm to pick it up! We all signed a thank you note that I wrote to the manager and gave it to him while picking up the pizza. They ended up giving us around two and a half pizzas (stuffed in one box) and a full grocery bag of breadsticks. One of the homeless guys we met at the church this morning named Vondel was also in the food court when we were. We invited him to eat with us (we obviously had some pizza to spare).After all five of us ate our fill, we still had lots of pizza and breadsticks leftover. I asked if we should keep some of the pizza for tomorrow, but I was quickly reminded by the guys of one of the reasons we were there: to trust in God to provide. I felt pretty selfish for a second, but I was happy to go along with the plan of giving the rest away. We walked right outside of Union Station and gave the rest of the pizza away to the homeless.

• We are now in Union Station and are thinking that this is going to be where we will have to stay for the night. We tried to persuade a few hotels to let us work for them for a little while for a room, but none of them allowed us in. I am having a hard time coping with being away from the comfort of people. Of course, I am around guys that I know, but I miss my family, friends (from home), and girlfriend much more than I expected to. I am really having to find comfort in God right now through prayer and reading the Word.