One young man at a time...

Jerry, one of our young men from our lunch program, recently got a job. We’ve been encouraging him for over a year to get a job and praying that God would provide one. Because of his new job, we haven’t seen him for a few months. However, he happened to be off work for our last lunch outreach, so he came to have lunch with us!

All of the volunteers told him how proud we were of him. We asked him how he liked his job and how often he works. He said, “I work at a furniture company six days a week, and it’s really hard work.”

When he thought about working there for a year or more, he said, “It just seems like the work is too hard to stay there for a year.”

As we heard this, we knew he needed encouragement. He was doing something that not many young men in his neighborhood do… get an honest, hard-working job and then stay there. We all shared our experiences with having hard jobs that we didn’t like; but since we stayed there, God provided better. We told him, “Don’t leave your job, Jerry. If you stay there and stick it out, God WILL lead you to something even better.”

Our prayer is that he truly heard us out and sticks with this job until he finds something better. We were so proud of Jerry! First of all because he got a job, and second of all that he is doing something that is normal for the general public, but extremely radical for peers his age. Most of his peers (men ages 18-25) in his neighborhood of John DeShields are hanging out on the street corner daily; selling drugs, getting into trouble and running from the law. Jerry’s story is one we want to see repeated over and over again… to see the streets of East St. Louis radically change, one young man at a time.