An extract from The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson
I think God saw to it, during those first long months of our work at the center, that we never found a cook. We tried every system under the sun to keep ourselves feed, but the one that never worked out was to have a full-time cook usurp the pantry. A kitchen is always the heart of the home anyhow, and a real cook has a way of chasing you out so that she can get her work done. Thus you are chased from the heart of the home.
Not so with the center, because we could never come up with a cook. The result was a wonderful chaotic, happy mess. And to understand it you must first understand where the food itself comes from. Like everything else at the center, we get our food by praying for it. This is one of the projects in which our living-in gang members take a most active role. Each day we pray for food, and the way it comes in is a vivid lesson to boys just learning about faith. People send in a ham, potato chips, fruit, vegetables. Or they send in money not earmarked for a special purpose.
One day, however, the kids awoke and washed and went down to breakfast and there wasn’t anything on the table. By the time I arrived in the office from home, the center was buzzing with problem of no food. “Your prayers didn’t work I guess this time, did they, Dave?” said one of the gang boys. “Lord,” I said to myself, “teach us a lesson in faith that will live with us forever.” And aloud, I said, “Let’s make an experiment. Here we are without food for the day, right?” the boy nodded his head. “And the bible says, ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ right?” “If you say so.”
I laughed and glanced at Reverend Culver, who shrugged and nodded his head as if to say he’d teach the boy the Lord’s Prayer. “So why don’t we all go into the chapel right now and pray that we either get the food for this day or money to buy the food.” “Before lunch, Dave?” said the boy. “I am getting hungry.” “Before launch. How many people do we have here?” I glanced around. The number in the Center was constantly shifting. On that day we could count twenty-five people who would need to be fed. I figured it would cost between thirty and thirty-five dollars to feed that number of people dinner and supper. Others agreed. So we went into the chapel, closed the door, and we all began to pray.
“While you are it, Lord,” said the little gang boy, “would You please see to it that we don’t go hungry for the rest of the summer?” I looked over, mildly annoyed. It seemed to me that this was stretching things a bit. But I had to admit that it would leave us freer to work at other kind of prayer if didn’t have to pay so much attention to such basic needs as food.
One of the things about our prayer at the center is that it needs to be a bit loud. We do pray aloud often, and there is a wonderful freedom in the Spirit that sometimes frightens people who hear if for the first time. They may think it is uncouth, without realizing that we are just expressing our true feelings before God. If we feel concerned, we say so not only with our lips but with the tone of our prayer. And this morning we were quite concerned. While we were saying so in tones that left no doubt how we felt, a stranger walked in. we didn’t even hear when she knocked on the door of the chapel. When finally she opened the door and saw all the twenty-five of us on our knees, thanking God for the food He has given us in the past and thanking Him too for the food He would be giving us, somehow, in this emergency, I’m sure she was sorry she had come.
“Excuse me,” she said, softly. “Excuse me! She said, louder. I was near her and Immediately got up. The rest of the workers and gang members kept right on with their prayer. This lady was a little hesitant about coming to the point of her visit. She kept asking questions, but I noticed that the more she found out about what we were doing, the more enthusiastic she became. Finally, she asked about the prayer session. I told her about walking in that morning to discover that we had no food in the house and about the purpose of the prayer. “When did you begin this prayer?” the lady asked. I figured up. “About an hour ago.” “Well,” she said, “that is truly extraordinary. I knew very little about your work. But an hour ago I received a sudden impulse to do something that is completely out of character for me. I felt that I was supposed to empty my piggy bank and bring the contents to you. Now I know the reason.” She reached into her purse.
She placed a white envelope on my desk and with an expression of hope that it would be of some help, she thanked me for showing her our Center, and left. The envelope contained just over thirty-two dollars, exactly the amount we needed to feed ourselves for the rest of the day.
And do you know, that teen-ager’s prayer was answered too! For the rest of the summer, we never again wanted for food.
