By Doug Wagner posted Oct 12, 2011 at 4:48 PM
"Why did you come across the street and speak to me," Steven asks Lucy. No one else would go near him except the young drug dealers who paid him $5 a day to hold their drugs. He looked like a concentration camp inmate and his socks were literally stuck to his unwashed feet. Recognizing the signs that he would die if he did not escape his addiction, Lucy crossed the street from Fellowship House and asked Steven if he wanted to get clean. Knowing his life was indeed at stake he said yes, but then got high and forgot that he had agreed to go for detox. When the hospital called Lucy saying he had just two hours to get there, she couldn't find him. Along with one of our faithful volunteers, Johnathan, she finally tracked him down in an abandoned building, cleaned him up and got him there in time. Four days later she sent him off to a Christian drug rehab ministry in Boston.
In rehab, Steven accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior. Three years later, he is an accomplished artist in his senior year at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he also teaches art classes for 4th & 5th grade children. Looking back on it all, he asks Lucy, "Why??? Why did you cross that street to me???" Well, Lucy knows why and we know why. Those whose lives are rooted in scripture hear Jesus saying, “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Those who attend to the Spirit's prompting understand the force which propelled her from the comfort and safety of Fellowship House across Broadway to the broken man leaning against the wall of the liquor store.
Steven is still trying to comprehend the love that reached out and touched him that fateful day. He expresses that quest in his art, which has begun to attract attention even at Yale University. He will be speaking at our annual Fall Breakfast on October 22, 2011, and one of his paintings will be auctioned off there to support our ministry. You will want to be there if at all possible to hear Steven’s powerful story.
We also invite you to give as much as you can to support Christ’s work that is taking place every day at Fellowship House. Every week, new people show up at our Addictions Victorious meetings—desperate men and women who’ve reached the end of their rope. Every week God shows up in their time of need to save them from their dependence on alcohol or drugs and from their life without Christ. Please keep Lucy and our Addiction Services Program in your prayers, so that we continue to see lives transformed by God.
UPDATED:
In case you weren't able to make it to our annual breakfast, here is the link to Steven's testimony. Click here to read.