They can't get away from us Now!

“They can’t get away from us now!”

How many of you at one time or another lived in an apartment complex?  It could have been an upscale unit with a fitness room, pool, lounge area, or the other end of the pendulum with noise, graffiti & roaches.  All of them still require people to live in confined spaces, very close to each other.  If you got along well with your neighbors, it was not so bad, BUT, live next door to the “neighbors from hell” and well, you know what I mean.   Is this where you find yourself today?

In these situations, it is understandable to grumble to God asking Him to provide relief and find you a new place to live.  You remind him that you were saved from hell and shouldn’t have to live next door to it!  But there you stay as though He never heard a word you prayed.

Acts 17: 26 says, “From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.”

So?  Who put you in that place in the first place?  Why did He determine you should live there?  To punish you for some evil you did when you were 14?  Just to mess with you?  Or….

…does He have a plan to reach your neighbors and that plan also involves you?

In San Diego, one of our staff couples moved into a complex a year ago and began to pray for ways they could love their neighbors.  There were the typical domestic fights, drugs being sold around them and even a dead body that showed up in the trunk of a car.  Still, they saw them as their mission field, as sheep without a shepherd, fatherless kids desperately looking for the love of a Father, single-moms in need of a Bride-Groom and teenagers looking for a Hope and a future.

So they organized prayer walks, hung out at the pool with a guitar singing worship songs, organized Bible studies, kid’s activities throughout the week, and parking lot cookouts as the picture shows.  Results = kids getting saved, parents getting saved, violence decreasing, undesirables leaving and Christians moving in - just like God had it all planned from the beginning J

Chesty Puller is the most decorated Marine in American history.  During a deadly battle on a Pacific island, he once shouted, “They are in front of us, behind us, and we are flanked on both sides by an enemy that outnumbers us 29 to 1.  They can’t get away from us now!”

God has strategically surrounded each of us with those who are lost.  They are not placed there to overtake us, but we are there to love them to Jesus because “They can’t get away from us now!”

Randy Fontaine

US Director