Miracles happen every day, they are not just something you read about in the Bible. I’ve experienced miracles during my life and I hope you have also. In this article, posted on the Charisma Magazine site (link below article), we learn how Christian teachers in San Francisco aggressively chose prayer and fasting to confront cultural issues facing them and their school children. This is an example of faith-in-action which is what Christ in culture, Christian culture, is all about.
Pop.
The students of San Francisco Christian Academy instantly recognize the noise.
Pop. Pop.
Academy teachers know the sounds too. Gunfire. Across the street.
Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco—as the famous song goes—but he probably didn’t leave it here in the city’s tough-as-nails Tenderloin district, otherwise known as “the Loin.”
It’s an otherwise pleasant day in the fall of 2013. As is their routine, a number of the academy’s 120 grade school children walk to recess at a nearby public playground. They know the route along Jones and Ellis Streets is dicey, but they’re accustomed to the scene: dealers selling drugs, homeless people pushing shopping carts, panhandlers asking for handouts, and drunks sleeping on broken slabs of sidewalk. This is the Tenderloin. This is home.
“Most of the kids live here,” says Marie-France Ladine, the academy’s co-founder and principal. “This is a tough place to grow up. They see and hear everything.”
Two major crimes take place every hour in this hardscrabble 50-block neighborhood that lies in the shadow of City Hall. Just a week earlier, someone shot a bullet in the night through a window at the academy’s storefront on Jones Street, the building shared with the school’s parent ministry, San Francisco City Impact.
No one was injured in either incident—not even close. “But we realized that we were vulnerable,” Ladine says. “We had to do something more to protect the children.”
What did she do? She bolstered existing safeguards, of course. But she also met with her staff and called for a time of prayer and fasting—exactly what her parents, Roger and Maite Huang, did 29 years earlier when they launched City Impact.
Only back then, it was just Roger, Maite and a bag of bologna sandwiches—50, to be exact. Three decades ago, Roger and his wife ventured into the troubled Tenderloin district of San Francisco with their bologna sandwiches and a prayer, and they haven’t looked back.
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Miraculous Answers
To date, the ministry has raised $75,000 of the projected $150,000 needed for equipment. Volunteers will build it, and the children in San Francisco Christian Academy’s K-8 school will finally have a safe place to play.
Ladine says, “Sometimes when we try to do it on our own, we quickly get a roadblock that says we cannot do it on our own and we have to call out to God. He always shows up.”
Her husband, Clint, who serves as associate pastor of City Impact Church, agrees.
“A lot of people have written off the Tenderloin,” he says. “I’m here to tell you that there is hope.”
Finish this article here: http://www.charismamag.com/life/miracles-san-francisco
Miracles do happen more often than people think. How often? As often as needed is the honest answer. If you need a miracle, God will arrange it. Seek him with prayer and fasting as necessary and let God work in your life.
The above article was written by Steven R. Lawson. Steven R. Lawson is a freelance writer and editor living in Southern California. He formerly served as news editor of Charisma and Christian Life. Allison Trowbridge contributed to this story.