Evicted And Living In Their Car During A Pandemic
The nationwide CDC eviction moratorium doesn’t protect all tenants from eviction or homelessness. Margaret and John Eaddy have been living out of their car for nearly three months after they were evicted from their home on September 29. Now, they are struggling to find permanent housing. According to lawyers and community organizers, many people are confused about their legal protections under the moratorium.
The Number of People Living in Cars is “Exploding” As Middle Class Slowly Wiped Out
If the U.S. economy is really doing so well, then why is homelessness rising so rapidly? As the gap between the rich and the poor continues to increase, the middle class is steadily eroding. In fact, I recently gave my readers 15 signs that the middle class in America is being systematically destroyed.
More Americans are falling out of the middle class and into poverty with each passing day, and this is one of the big reasons why the number of homeless is surging.
For example, the number of people living on the street in L.A. has shot up 75 percent over the last 6 years. But of course L.A. is far from alone. Other major cities on the west coast are facing similar problems, and that includes Seattle. It turns out that the Emerald City has seen a 46 percent rise in the number of people sleeping in their vehicles in just the past year…
The number of people who live in their vehicles because they can’t find affordable housing is on the rise, even though the practice is illegal in many U.S. cities.
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Heaven Hears Each Whisper
written by Kelsey Tyler
Reader Comment: An affirmation of all of my prayers, my faith and all of the miracles that I have experienced!
Prayer has always been the most personal and unique way to celebrate faith. It provides an occasion to talk, to meditate, to ask, to praise, to say “thank you.” …
THE MANY FACES OF MARY,Readers Comments: “You need a box of tissues when you read it.” “I couldn’t put it down.” “The stories allowed me to experience all of The Immaculate Mother’s Apparitions.”
A BOOK OF ANGELS
By Sophy Burnham
Reader Comment: The book’s opening tells of angels lovingly playing with man in happiness and fun until man became bored. The angels from that point on, decided to hide in the hearts of man. The big question today, is whether or not man will seek within his own heart God’s joy?
A BOOK OF ANGELS tells not only the extraordinary true stories of present-day encounters with angels, but also traces the understanding and study of angels through history and in different cultures. …
TRIUMPHAL PROCESSION
Author: Andrew M. Villarreal
*****UNAVAILABLE
Reader Comment: “Triumphal Procession” is a historical perspective that re-examines the conscience of the nations of the world, living in today’s darkness.
Read: “Triumphal Procession” and you will understand why nations continue to struggle in great spiritual chaos. Every Christian and every reader seeking Christ should be reminded: the more prayer, the mightier we become in God’s mercy to be blessed against evil.
~~~~~
Has your prayer life come to a standstill? Is it quiet? This brief history of France during WWII reveals the pitfalls and dangers that dampen the prayer life of a believer.
The Nation of France has a history of triumphs, but in 1940 the streets of Paris were empty and quiet.
The darkest hour of it’s existence was at hand. What happens next? Could history repeat itself? Without prayer, triumph cannot exist.
Storm Warning, by Billy Graham
Reader Comment: “Truly powerful…prompting everyone to bear witness to these times.”
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I’m a prayer warrior for all of this! ❤️
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Sister in Christ, how blessed it is to know that you are in the unite. 🙏
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I feel the same! ❤️
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God help us all! This is heartbreaking.
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Amen Amen! What a mess.
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We are all on a precipice.
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The Vandelia I LOVE vignette #3
Posted onFebruary 16, 2016 by Agent X
Midnight Communion.
That is what Special Agent D (SAD) and I called it. That is what my most previous post describes – the birth of Midnight Communion. That little ministry had such a deep impact on me… on my imagination. We confronted the meanest streets of Lubbock at the meanest hours of the night armed only with the love of God, and we found that the drug dealers, the pimps, and the prostitutes were afraid of us! It was a thrill.
I posted several days ago under the title – Stupid Things I’ve Done For Jesus – about loving a hooker. I did not describe our communion service in connection with that post, but it was involved. When I stop to reflect on that relationship, I am still utterly amazed at how our celebration of that lost lamb made such a deep impact on her life. She sobered up for nine months, and we did not even ask her to try! I will not hide the fact that currently she is not doing so well, but I can’t help but wonder what would have happened to her if more and more church people had ventured out on those streets to love her. That touch, that shout for joy at finding her, the story that unfolded about how I had searched for her for months on end….
Would it have made a lasting impact if dozens of church people repeated that interaction with her?
But then there were those shootings I referred to as well. SAD and I had not been out there the night those people got shot, but we invited Vandelia to attend a special communion service at the sites of each shooting following worship that next Sunday. Only a small group followed us there, but perhaps there were about a dozen. And the remarkable thing that I can’t forget is how the children from the apartment complex joined us for those communion services AND told what they had experienced. These young children described their fear as gunfire broke out, how they ran for their lives, and when it was over about the Police and EMS response. They took us to the still visible blood stains, and we drank Jesus’s blood there with them.
And it is the children that I want to highlight in this post particularly. It seemed that the adults tended to fear us and think we were undercover cops, but the children just did not care about that. They were as innocently curious as children can be. But the kicker is that we encountered them at midnight on the streets.
I recall this one night in particular when SAD and I had set up our communion table and lantern in the empty lot of 65th Drive, and then we set out to invite people to join us for communion. But by the time we were set up and reaching out, the adults all disappeared. The kids, however, came flocking to us.
In those days, I was very shy about children’s ministry. I was all in favor of it, but I had no ambition to be a part of it. In fact, I did not really want to be involved at all. But when we were set up to receive people to the Table of the Lord in the middle of 65th Drive at midnight, we were willing to take anybody who would accept the invitation. And well, on this one occasion, it was children! (Mark 9:37 …anyone???) Some of them were quite young! One was in diapers and not old enough to speak… and I met her completely unattended by adult supervision at midnight on the worst street in Lubbock for drugs and prostitution! She was left completely to the care of the other children. I could have stole her, and no one would know (I think)!
Suddenly SAD and I were surrounded by children ranging in age from 6 to 14. I do not recall how many, but I think we had about 8 of them. And they were most insistent that we should welcome them to our party! SAD and I consulted each other and decided it was important to get permission from some parental figure if at all possible. The kids were able to locate this one little, old lady in one of the apartments who gave them permission to join us in the dark, empty lot across the street.
What can I say? The party was on!
It was very cold that night. SAD and I wore coats, but the kids were running around in blankets. So, we all huddled close and shivered around our table in the dark. SAD began telling the children the story of Baby Moses and then the Exodus, and as he spoke, these kids from the poor side of town (kids who in my experience as a substitute teacher for LISD were often among the hardest to control in a classroom setting) sat there like perfect, little soldiers eating up every word for over an hour!
As I recall it, we opened up the communion with prayer, but we also asked the kids to share their lives with us as we ate the communion bread and drank the Sparkling Grape Juice. The kids began lamenting that one of their friends had not joined us for the party. I inquired why not? It turned out that this adolescent boy, who we will call “Agent X2,” had felt ridiculed by these same kids earlier that day at school. Agent X2 had worn a shirt to school that day which the administration had deemed inappropriate, and so he was sent home. However, the problem was that being unable to obtain appropriate attire, he had been forced to wear his mother’s shirt, and the kids knew it was his mother’s shirt, so they had made fun of him. It broke my heart! This kid was so poor, he could not go to school dressed appropriately and was ashamed.
We prayed for Agent X2 in our communion service. We talked about how Jesus cares about stuff like that. I think the kids at our worship service began feeling really convicted about their ridicule of Agent X2. And I cannot imagine how we might have addressed this concern if we had not been there at midnight with our crazy idea that communion at that place and in that hour might serve God in some way! Go figure!
We spent nearly two hours with those kids in that dark, empty lot on 65th Drive, and they ate up every minute of it. But SAD and I looked at each other thinking about how the cold, night air at 2am was a good time to call it quits. We each had jobs and a “day life.” We began explaining to the kids that we needed to pack it in and go home. They pleaded with us to stay. We insisted; they caved… but only on the promise that we would return to do it again soon! “Tomorrow night???? Please… please… please???” We escorted the children back to the apartment where we met the “granny” who gave us all “permission” to go into the dark, empty lot across the street at midnight on the worst, crime-ridden street in Lubbock. She took the kids back in with her, and at last it was quiet as SAD and I walked back to our table to pack it in for the night.
At that moment SAD turned to me and asked, “That woman… was she really trusting or really stupid?” I said, “That woman was really stupid. She does not know us. We could have been anybody. We could have done anything with those kids. But I will say this: Even if we never come back again, those kids will always remember the night those two, crazy, white boys took them into the dark, empty lot across the street and worshipped Jesus with them!”
No one will ever be able to take that away from them. That moment of imaginative celebration will go with them. They will always remember it. It will always be a touch stone whether we build on it or not! That is power! And I hope that long after I am dead and buried, that at least a couple of those kids, when they are old, tell young children about that crazy night and the impact Jesus had on them!
I am so deeply blessed to have played this tiny role in Vandelia’s ministry. This is one of the brighter moments that led me to embrace a prophetic ministry. I have always centered ministry on that Table of the Lord ever since. And we were sent there by Vandelia!
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God is in charge. Children in hardship remember goodness and though they will go through storms, goodness will signal their directions. God is guiding us through all right and wrong choices. The answer that we cannot discern in life’s darkness is love. Love is magic! Love is powerful! Love is the answer because God is love. Be blessed and stay blessed.
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A Soft Sucking Symphony
Posted onNovember 26, 2016 by Agent X
I am learning what parents of twins, triplets, quads, and quints (and nurses in nursery wards) have long known: The sound of multiple babies sucking their bottles at once.
Yes. It is a precious noise. All the soft grunts, sighs, and swallows making rhythmic tempo – IN STEREO! You have to turn off a lot of other noise in the house to hear it, but it is a special and beautiful noise. Taking care of two or more babies at once is an enormous job. Just one takes all you’ve got. Two or more just gets to be mind-blowing, but then the Soft Sucking Symphony reveals the incredible blessing!
It’s like double the crap too! Poo-pocalypse! Dirty diapers at all hours. One wakes up at 2 am hungry and starts crying, and sure enough the other one joins the fray. Then after all the mess is cleaned up, all the lights turned back off, there in the dark Silent Night God plays his Soft Sucking Symphony – AND BLESSED ARE THE EARS THAT HEAR IT!!!
But then tomorrow, early before the rooster crows, before even Peter has a chance to deny his Lord three times, the pooping, the peeing, the crying, starts over – ALL – over AGAIN! It seems there is no end! And in the early morning, with the older children running around, the coffee percolating, the days headlines barking on the TV, your honey frantically searching for the car keys, you are not likely to hear the Soft Sucking Symphony. No. That is the blessing of the wee hours of the Silent Night with Baby Jesus away in his manger. In the raw lucidity of, say, Monday morning, there is no time to notice or care and too much noise interfering anyway.
And it’s not like the infant says, “Thank you” or learns a lesson and never does THAT again. No. The rodeo is on again at “bedtime” Monday night… and Tuesday night, and Wednesday, Thursday… and Next Monday… and the Monday after that… and the next… on and on and on and on! You can’t imagine how long this will go on!
And then eighteen years pass and you watch your children leave HOME and you think it all went so fast! You recall the Soft Sucking Symphony that you will never hear again, and you long for those late night meetings with Baby Jesus crapping on you.
No. The baby does not say: Thanx. And growing up is both PAINFULLY slow and fast AT THE SAME TIME. It does not go in a steady straight line, but a day comes when the child is fit for college, or as one of our children found – the United States Marine Corps. And you spend the rest of your life hoping you made them fit for the Kingdom of God!
Newborn babies seem to have a built-in excuse for all this sloppy behavior. All this crapping, puking, crying, and peeing get a pass, and we hold anyone who puts one of these creatures out to the night criminally accountable! They don’t know any better, we say. And it’s true.
Grown up homeless men and women, however, have a built-in stigma and bare the blame for both their own behavior and that of others. All the boozing, crapping, crying and withdrawing (whether caused in part of in whole by mental illness, a culture of drug addiction and divorce, or even war-related PTSD) gets little or no pass. In fact, “helping” too much meets public scorn!
But I am a living witness. If you go join a camp of homeless men and woman who share an interest in worshiping Jesus with you, then Jesus is there in your midst (Matt. 18:20). And as you worship deep into the night, perhaps you will hear, as I have heard, another version of the Soft Sucking Symphony. People snoring, or as I had the pleasure once of eavesdropping a couple who spoke of their dreams for the future home they wanted to build together.
It might take eighteen years to get them fit for living in a HOME, but who are we to say they are not worth it? And why are we soooooo easily discouraged over the one baby and not the other?
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And blessings come in so many flavors and sounds. Nurturing babes is an input of love, for an output of love.❤️
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Proph-O-Drama WeddingPosted onOctober 19, 2015 by Agent XPerhaps you woke up to this news headline about a wedding getting called off at the last minute and the reception then given to Sacramento, California’s homeless. It is a touching story. I certainly want to commend the bride’s family for their kind charity. And though plenty of critics will find cause to beat the When-Helping-Hurts drum, the only criticism I can offer is to ask why the homeless were only invited when the wedding was called off?I have personal experience in exactly this scenario. I want to share with you the story of Agent X and Mrs. Agent X’s wedding. It was way more humble than the headline-making party in this morning’s news, but it was intentional by design.When Agent X asked the future Mrs. Agent X to marry him, they both came from previous failed marriages. Both were children of divorce. Both were keenly desirous to invite Jesus to their wedding and into their marriage. And since Agent X had begun a life in prophetic ministry, we saw the opportunity to invite Jesus to a wedding as something overtly biblical!How do you invite Jesus to your wedding?(Glad you asked.)The X’s consulted Scripture like a wedding planner. A number of texts lent themselves to this staged proph-O-drama, among them being Matthew 25, where Jesus equates “the least of these brothers and sisters” with himself, and Luke 24, where Jesus is revealed in the breaking of bread. It quickly became clear that communion with the poor would be central to the wedding plan. And that is when Agent X decided to follow the Holy Spirit’s Script of a wedding like the party/parties of Luke 14. (Please take a minute and read Luke 14:7-24.)We decided to make the whole ceremony into an extended communion service. It would be a sit-down meal punctuated with prayer, bread, and “fruit of the vine” at strategic points and an exchange of vows in the midst of it all. No altar, no aisle to walk down, no giving the bride away – all that traditional stuff is nice, but it had not served either us or our parents well. All that mattered was inviting Jesus to join us.It was a relatively uncomplicated idea to invite the poor. We asked permission to host our wedding at Carpenter’s Church. Some of the poorest people in Lubbock can be found there every day. We got the brother-in-law to prepare the fatted calf Texas-BBQ-style and cater the homeless. As the wedding got underway, the bride and groom even made a ceremonial/prophetic walk through the alleys nearby to invite and compel any homeless people we met to come to our party. But throwing a Luke-14 party suggests there would be seats of honor, and someone would have to be shamed into taking a lower seat.How do you shame someone at your own wedding? Who would want to do that?That was a tough question. We wanted to be true to the Luke 14 Script, but we did not want to hurt anyone’s feelings – not at our wedding! That did not seem Christ-like. Perhaps we could ask someone to pretend to take the seat of honor and thus stage the humiliation as an actor (the very definition of hypocrite, btw). That idea just seemed too disingenuous. We wanted to be for real!After much thought and prayer, the X’s decided it was not possible to plan this feature in the wedding. After much prayer and consultation with Script and with others, we decided to quietly drop that part out of the proph-O-drama and scramble the tables in the wedding hall so that there would be no “seats of honor” – except the bride and groom’s seats. We decided we would be the last to take seats so that no one could upstage another. In fact we opted to sit with the homeless at our table rather than family! It seemed that was as close as we could come to honoring that portion of Scripture.Then the ceremony began. Most of our guests were already there at, or around, Carpenter’s Church. (If you have ever been there, you know it is often surrounded with people loitering under the NO LOITERING signs.) Our family began to arrive. Soon, they began to catch the drift of the ceremony. The bride’s aunt and uncle particularly took up the mantle to serve in humility.Seriously. Who packs their own wedding with HOMELESS people?(God does.)What can I say? The party was on. The homeless took to the feast like a duck takes to water. The family had never been to a wedding so intentionally humble, but they figured out their roles quickly enough. But the bride and groom only felt anxious that Jesus come. We purposefully asked Jesus to come to our wedding and to our marriage. And as we looked around the room at our guests, we hoped they were the evidence that he had accepted our invitation. (But still the groom grieved that the seats-of-honor part had to be cut out of the Script.)We asked one family member to emcee the affair. He directed us through the party with prayers and comments on each element. The children would actually serve communion bread and “fruit-of-the-vine” as the meal/ceremony unfolded. This was a meal with someone talking us through it, explaining how there would be communion and vows exchanged WHILE we ate.It was just at the moment when we began to break the communion bread that the door of Carpenter’s Church flew open and one last street drifter stumbled in. He rubbed his eyes a second, looked around at the party and started to back out the door again saying, “Oh… sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”It was just then that the groom looked around the room and noticed there were no empty seats left. The house was packed. There was no seat left for Jesus when (in the form of “one of the least of these”) he came in the door right at the breaking of the bread!”SOMEBODY GET JESUS A CHAIR!!!There were no seats left! But then it became clear to the groom – I have taken the seat of honor out of turn. Whoever sits with the bride has the seat of honor!!!Suddenly the groom jumped up and prevented the drifter’s retreat. The groom put a halt in the whole ceremony and communion prayer as he COMPELLED the man to take the seat next to the bride. The groom rushed around to prepare one last plate of BBQ’d fatted calf and served the man. Then the groom shared the seat with the bride next to this Jesus who did accept the invitation to the Luke 14 wedding party and proph-O-drama!Sadly, that wedding made no headlines. But if we had more weddings like this, perhaps there would be no “broken homes” and maybe even no more homelessness.
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An outstanding testimony Agent. Marriages are made sacred in the church with the acknowledgement of good merits. Those acknowledge merits are dissolved when the marriage submits to the world. Christ is in attendance at Christian marriages because each couple and minister is calling upon him as: In the name of God, I, (groom’s name), take you, (bride’s name), to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow. They drop hands. I commend you and your spouse for making every effort to live out God’s truth. There is so much richness in poverty that the world is to blind to see. Blessings you are at the door of God’s love in Christ.
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