We truly need your help. You already know that we have an opportunity to purchase a house in the heart of the neighborhood where we’re ministering to the homeless and poor. It’s an amazing situation – just $35,000 for the house and repairs – but at this moment we only have $10,250 including pledges. We urgently need friends to help right now. Could you please pray about an immediate gift to Prodigal’s Home to help us seize this opportunity?

I’m asking for the sake of people like Scotty. He was the invisible man. Homeless for 15 years, a drug addict, and no ID. No way to get ID. And without ID, no way to get any support or help, except from folks like us. It was like he didn’t exist – officially, socially, almost physically.

Kim spent more than a year working to get new ID for Scotty, struggling with the authorities to reconstruct Scotty’s “official existence.” She finally achieved the goal – but Scotty was addicted to heroin; and within 3 months, while he was “high,” someone stole his new ID.

He was back to square one. Kim, as you can imagine, was … let’s say “a little irritated.” But she never gave up on Scotty.

He was embarrassed to admit to her what had happened – he avoided us for months. But finally he showed up. Not to ask for help with ID (Kim had kept duplicates of his documents on file, so getting replacements would be much easier). What Scotty really came back for was the friendship. Love is a magnet. And it’s hard to come by, in Sunnyslope.

This past summer, Kim took Scotty to Cold Stone Creamery for his birthday. As they were sitting there, Scotty began to break down. He told Kim he couldn’t understand how someone like Kim would take someone like him to a public place like Cold Stone Creamery for his birthday.

She told him why: Because she cared deeply about him. And, frankly, because he reminded her of an old friend who had died several years ago. And life is too short not to stay friends with your friends.

And then, as they sat in that ice cream parlor, out of the blue, Scotty said two amazing words: “I’m ready.”

Kim knew exactly what he meant. He wanted off the streets… off heroin and methamphetamine… He wanted his life back.

The very next day Kim took Scotty to a halfway house and rehabilitative clinic. We paid for his time there. That was 35 days ago.

This is the longest Scotty has been clean and sober and living indoors in a decade and a half.

It’s the culmination of a 30-month process. But most of the work, most of the interaction, most of the time we’ve spent with Scotty has been out in the open, on the street, or in cars, or borrowed space. We’ve never been able to welcome Scotty into a safe, comfortable place, to sit down and talk, have a cup of coffee or a bowl of soup….

We can do much, much more for the homeless of Sunnyslope, and much more efficiently, if we have a place of our own. But it will take an outpouring of Christlike compassion, of generosity and maybe even sacrifice, from caring Christian people, in order to make it happen.

Please do what you can. Thanks for understanding my urgency about this.

Grace & Peace,

Mike

To read my first e-mail about Scotty, from January 2009:
Hopefully he’s been in prison here

And the followup e-mail when he received his ID in March 2009:
Finally