July 2003

A SURPRISE ENCOUNTER

Our oldest granddaughter just graduated from kindergarten.  During the ceremony the children showed us how they had memorized Scriptures as well as rules of grammar and phonics.  They even paraded with mortarboard hats.  As we were having refreshments, my son-in-law introduced me to a Hispanic man whose granddaughter was also graduating.  I had heard that he ran a camp for troubled teens, and his name seemed familiar to me.  I asked him if he had ever been at David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge center in New York City.  He asked what year, and I said 1966.  He excitedly said yes, in fact, that was the year he was converted.  I explained that I had been there that same year and thought that I remembered him. 

The story behind the story is that Victor had been a drug addict and gang member on the streets of New York and found Christ through Wilkerson’s ministry.  He was living at the Teen Challenge Center as he dried out from the drugs and learned about the Christian faith.  That is what he was doing there. 

I was with a singing group called The Collegians.  It was the year before I was married, and we had toured the Eastern part of the United States, and ended up spending most of the summer at Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge Center in New York.  We would go into the neighborhoods where there were a lot of drugs and crime and begin to sing.  It was not long until there was a group forming around us and people hanging out of windows.  After we sang, young men and women like Victor would share their testimonies and invite people to give their lives to the Christ who had changed them. 

We stayed in the same living quarters as the young men fresh off the streets, and saw a lot of people going through the ugly process of withdrawal. 

As Victor and I parted company that night, I said to my family, “Who would have thought 37-years-ago that a Hispanic gang member from New York and I would one day have granddaughters graduating from the same Christian school on the same night in Pataskala, Ohio!”  Our granddaughters had become friends without knowing the history their grandfathers shared.

I have to marvel at a God who brings his people together in such wonderful ways.  Without Christ, Victor and I would both have led very different lives and had very little in common.  I would have been as lost as Victor.  But because of Christ, we have everything in common and share a love for each other that surpasses what I have with people I have known longer and who have very similar backgrounds to mine. 

Enjoying the providence of God,

Rod