When we first arrived in San Francisco, I thought we were more than prepared to face the challenges of founding another new mission. After all, when we established the Bridgeport Rescue Mission in Connecticut, we were shot at, terrorized, and abused. We didn’t think it could get any worse. But we learned that no one is ever ready for San Francisco.

We started by renting the fourth floor of an old welfare hotel in the heart of Skid Row. The Hotel was home to the mentally challenged, the indigent, prostitutes, drug dealers, and addicts. We took possession of one entire floor. Our whole family, including our five children, moved onto the floor; we cordoned off one section of the hallway to use as our living quarters. We used the rest of the floor to house men in our Second Chance Discipleship Program.

We soon realized we had planted a gospel mission in a place shrouded in darkness and evil. While we were there, we experienced the presence of sinister forces that probed the depths of our faith and commitment. Initially, we felt discouraged by the everyday realities that confronted us. We saw death and the awful consequences of sin and met people without futures and hope. And amid all this chaos and confusion, we found Christ.

He was there, in that slum, experiencing the pain of those lost in the darkness. Through his people, he reached out with love and good news to the wounded and broken, the homeless and the prostitutes, and the infected and the habitual sinner. God cares in an unexplainable way for those labeled as outcasts by society.

I must admit that God moved us way beyond our comfort zones. The ghettos and gang warfare of Bridgeport, Connecticut, never tested us as intensely as the poverty of spirit and body in San Francisco.

Often at night, we were awakened by the tortured screams of the mentally challenged who lived in our building or the building next store, just three feet from our bedroom window. You could hear the squeals of rats fighting in the alley for scraps of food tossed out the windows by our building’s tenants.

The smells of poverty were everywhere. When I took our children to school each morning, we were often greeted by the pungent odor of fresh urine as we stepped into the elevator. The sidewalks in front of our building reeked of stale beer and vomit. The aroma of marijuana was almost overpowering.

Drug dealers sold drugs at our front door. Both male and female prostitutes offered themselves to people walking by, many in a hurry to get to their destinations. Homeless men and women slept up and down our street, in doorways, and on sidewalks. As we walked past the buildings on our block, we turned our eyes away to avoid the pictures of nude women staring at us from the porno theaters and strip clubs.

While waiting for the previous residents on our floor to move, our whole family was crammed into one small room. Cockroaches were everywhere. At night, we had to brush them out of our beds before sleeping. It was so dangerous that the children couldn’t even use the bathroom without one of us accompanying them.

One night, we were awakened by the smell of smoke. Earlier, we had heard the smoke detectors, but after a while, you learn from all the false alarms to wait for the smoke before you react. We ended up spending hours on the street in the middle of the night, hoping and praying as the firefighters worked feverishly to extinguish the fire that raged on the floor above our family apartment. Thank God there was only a little smoke and water damage.

I am not a special person with more courage than the average person. As in other cities, San Francisco was a big challenge to us both physically and emotionally. And yet, as ugly as our situation was, I was propelled forward by my vision of what God could do in the lives of the men and women living on the streets in skid row. I wanted my life to matter and count for something significant. Beyond that, I longed to hear God say to me, as I stood before him on the other side of the grave, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”

San Francisco was not a big success. In the midst of our startup, Tammy became seriously ill, forcing us to leave and move closer to her family. Fortunately, using the resources God gave us during the startup phase, another ministry picked up where we left off.