"We can do no great things..."

“…Only simple things, with great love.”

That’s a quote (from Mother Teresa) that I often include either when briefing or debriefing our outreach “Roses to Prostitutes” (which mainly consists of going out late at night and handing out roses to the girls who work the streets of Winnipeg and telling them that God loves them).

This outreach is often one of the most impacting to the youth who come through our program for a number of reasons, and a common response we get is something along the lines of “the girls just seemed so…normal.”

One evening, early on in my career with YWAM, I was leading this outreach and it just wasn’t going how i wanted it to. We lead this outreach in one of two ways: Walking, or driving. This night i was leading the walking version in our neighbourhood. I was leading my group through the West End and we had been walking for probably close to an hour having seen only one girl (and she took off, running, as soon as she saw us). So I was getting somewhat discouraged and confused at that point. I went by all the corners where the girls usually hang out and no luck.

So, somewhat angrily, I prayed that God would give me some direction, because I just wanted the group to experience this outreach.

Then the youth pastor of the group I was leading came up to me and told me a story…

We had just passed a bingo hall as everyone was leaving it and one girl saw our group and the roses and stopped Randy (the youth pastor) and some of the guys in the group. She asked them if they were the group that hands out roses to girls who work the streets, and Randy said that that was what we were doing. She then said that she had been given a rose about a year earlier and that is was a huge boost to her self-esteem. She went on to encourage them that what we were doing has a huge impact on the working girls, that she had eventuall quit hooking because of it, and that (at the time she told us) she had been sober for 111 days.

Needless to say, after hearing that I felt simultaneously incredibly encouraged, and incredibly humbled. The group was pretty impacted by that story, as well.

While the group didn’t end up giving out any roses that night (we walked around for another hour and a half, before calling it a night), I took them out again a couple nights later and we handed out all our roses within a half-hour.


It’s especially interesting that as I write this post, I’m chatting with a former MA student who is planning on taking a group to do Roses in Winnipeg. This has happened with a few of our local teams. Do any of you other MA Locations have stories of your teams repeating outreaches on their own initiative?

P.S. So, I just discovered that quote I’ve been using is slightly mangled. The original quote is as follows: “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.“

Comments

[phil]

great story Brendan.

[t-bone]

Praise God! That story rocks.