Stories from the Fontlines: Bruce

Hi all! Just some background...one of our amazing City Hosts (Ben) is putting together a monthly newsletter called "Stories from the Frontlines". In it, he tells the story of people living in San Francisco and how we can be praying for them. Please take a moment and remember that these stories are real people and pray for them!

Bruce
Every time a new group comes in to spend the week with us, we take them on a prayer tour. This is a tour through the city where we show them around and have them spend a couple of hours in prayer for the city. At a couple of locations, we get out of the car and pray for the people in the city. Sometimes when we are stopped at these places pan-handlers will identify us as Christians and ask us for money, many times telling long extravagant stories.
This was what I thought was about to happen when I met Bruce. During the first stop of a prayer tour, a young man walked up to our group of middle school children. “I don’t usually do this,” he said, “but I saw that you all were Christians, and I just need you all to pray for me.” Bruce had recently run away from home. He was homeless, hungry, and cold. He never told us what had occurred to cause him to run away, but he did say that he wasn’t ready to return home just yet. Apparently he had a very strained relationship with his father, and he wanted to give it a few weeks, before he returned.
Bruce asked us to pray for him. He wanted us to pray that he would be safe on the streets for a couple of weeks and that God would repair the relationship he had with his father. The whole time, I kept expecting him to ask us if we had a little bit of change to spare. He never did. We prayed for him as a group, and then he smiled and walked away. “How cynical have I become?” I asked myself.
Pray for Bruce, that he WOULD remain safe and be able stay away from the lures of drugs and sex that draw so many teen runaways in this city. Also pray for me and for all of the missionaries that are hassled so often that we have come to expect it. I don’t want to be that way.