Hope Lutheran Church is located in Toronto but more accurately Scarborough which was swallowed up by Toronto about 10 years ago.

Scarborough unfortunately has also been called “Scarlem” because of the high crime rates.  Someone once said to me, “Why would you guys pick that location?  It’s so rough…”  To which I answered, “Where better for a church to be than amongst those who need us most.”

An example of why we are here comes from a young Philippino man.  He is from our neighborhood.  A young guy probably 23 years old.  He has church doorbeen to our church a few times.  About 4 months ago he came to me with joy written all over him.  “Pastor my girlfriend and I are having a baby” he exclaimed “and we want our baby to be baptized at your church.”  I was hopeful but did not hear from him for quite some time and had no contact information.   But last week he showed up again.  He knocked on the church door and handed me a white envelope.  He said, “This is for the church.  It’s not much but it’s my first fruits.”  I thanked him and told him I would put it in the offering plate on Sunday.

I then asked him about his girlfriend and their baby.  He paused and said, “Well Pastor things are not good.”  Not good was putting it mildly.  He continued on to tell me how his girlfriend had left him and stopped returning his calls.  In her seventh month of pregnancy when most women are beginning to think of the color of their babies room she was running with a pimp, prostituting herself out in order to pay for her heroin addiction.  She and her baby were being abused regularly.  The young man had tried to contact her himself but to no avail.  He had contacted her father and her father hung up the phone.  As he stood before me outside our church that evening his next move was to turn in the mother of his child for prostitution and drug abuse.

With that on his shoulders that young man brought his first fruits to God.  What was his motivation?  I don’t know, but I do know that he could not sink any lower or be more desperate for himself and his family than at that moment and it was the door of Hope Church that he knocked on.   I cannot help but remember Jesus words during the calling of Matthew; “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ’sinners’?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”  We prayed together and asked God to be with this young man, his girlfriend and his unborn child.

Only in our world which has been so thoroughly destroyed and corrupted by sin would a young man stand at a church door with a story like his.  Yet it is here that God’s amazing grace tastes most sweet.  It is in our world of desperation that we have the privilege of giving the only true answer, Jesus Christ.

In Christ,
Missionary Timothy Spiegelberg