Thursday, Sept. 23, 2004 - 11:39 a.m.

Isn't this beautiful? entry 2

Title: A Lighthouse in Brooklyn

Author: Elisabeth Elliot


For forty years a little piece of my heart has been in Brooklyn, New York. For a few months in 1951 I lived there in order to attend a Spanish-speaking church and take language lessons before going to Ecuador. But now a bigger piece of my heart is in Brooklyn--so big, in fact, that I have felt a longing to give up the house we live in and the work we do and just move there!

I'll explain. I'd been invited to speak to a group of women on a Saturday afternoon at Brooklyn Tabernacle. It sounded interesting, but I was not expecting anything quite so thrilling as it proved to be. Brooklyn, for a start, is a tough place. There's a lot of poverty. Drugs and muggings and murders are practically everyday occurrences, and there had been some very ugly riots between Jews and blacks in one of the most "civilized" sections. The neighborhood where I had lived was pretty bleak back then, so I wondered if it could be any worse now. I was eager to try to find 519 Bushwick Avenue (a fifth-floor walk-up, at $17 per month--lots of noise, strange cooking odors, large rats, and very little heat or hot water). Abraham, the kind man who drove us around, managed to find the location all right, but the whole block had been razed (no wonder). There was nothing there but empty lots. Well, not empty really--mattresses, old refrigerators, bedsprings, tires, sofas with the stuffings coming out--you name it, you could have picked it up. In fact, there were such mountains of trash everywhere, I wondered where they'd put it if they ever did decide to clean up the place. Desolate and depressing in the extreme. Graffiti, that hideous evidence of defiance of all law and order, covered every surface within reach of the ground and many high above it. Abraham said thousands of people are always cleaning it up, and it's back the next morning.

I kept thinking about the old gospel song, "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning" Here's part of it:

Dark the night of sin has settled,

Loud the angry billows roar;

Eager eyes are watching, longing,

For the lights along the shore

Let the lower lights be burning,

Send a gleam across the wave,

Some poor, fainting, struggling seaman

You may rescue, you may save.

There on Flatbush Avenue stands Brooklyn Tabernacle, sending its gleam across the wave. Thousands have "made the harbor" because of its light. My audience was a wonderful mixture of colors and ethnic backgrounds, the music was louder than I'm used to but wonderfully exuberant and heartfelt. There was no doubt about it--those women were worshipping. I heard some of their stories--to me nearly unimaginable--of drugs, alcohol, abuse, poverty, abandonment. One mother's anonymous letter to the pastor told of her own heartbreak. Just that week she had learned that her fourteen-year-old daughter was pregnant. The father of the baby was the girl's seventeen-year-old brother. That mother said she had wanted to kill herself and her children, "But I'm making it," she wrote, "with Jesus and the help of this church."

We heard their two-hundred-voice choir at the Billy Graham rally in Central Park on Sunday afternoon. In the evening, after I had spoken again at the Tabernacle, we were having supper with a group of the church folks. I asked a woman named Marie to tell me her story. Her husband smiled and said, "She loves to tell it! It's her favorite story." How I wish I had room for the whole thing.

Her mother, five months pregnant, died of cancer. Marie, the baby, survived and was put in a foundling hospital. Later she was entrusted to the care of nuns who treated her cruelly, although they taught her about God. She felt sure God was better than they were, and she knew her daddy loved her, but she was hungry for more. At age ten she began sniffing glue. This led to smoking pot, then doing drugs for the next fifteen years. On a Club Med vacation in Mexico with her boyfriend she began to wonder why she was born. Why had God made her? What meaning was there in it all? God clearly spoke to her "Maria, give me your life. This is your last chance." Suddenly she lost her desire for drugs and told her boyfriend she would not sleep with him anymore. On her return to New York she found that a group of friends had been praying for her at the very time when this happened. Hers is a totally transformed life. She's married to the boyfriend, who is now a pastor.

"You should have seen me," he said, "long hair, three earrings in each ear, feathers!"

I thought of my own upbringing--Christ as the Head of our house, parents who loved Him, each other, and us. No alcohol or drugs, just the Bible and hymn-singing. A clean house on a clean street. I thought of Nicky Cruz's testimony that same afternoon at the Graham meeting--from deep sin and sorrow to joy; and of Johnny Cash's simple words: "Alcohol never gave me peace. Drugs never brought me happiness. I found both in Jesus Christ. He changed my life." Then he sang, "The Old Account Was Settled Long Ago," while his dear June burst in with her lusty refrain, "Down on my knees!"

Tears come as I write, remembering the unutterable JOY I saw on those upturned faces during those two days. Those people were still living with huge tribulations and deep heartbreaks, yet there was joy, there was peace, and there was love such as I see in few churches. I don't know when I've had so many hugs. How to account for it all? It's quite simple:

This doctrine of the cross is sheer folly to those on their way to ruin, but to us who are on the way to salvation, it is the power of God.... To shame the wise, God has chosen what the world counts folly, and to shame what is strong, God has chosen what the world counts weakness. He has chosen things low and contemptible, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order. So there is no place for human pride in the presence of God....He is our righteousness; in him we are consecrated and set free.

1 Corinthians 1:18, 27-30, NEB

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