March through the Valley #3: Hitchhiking

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Nick Holovaty:

This past summer, Rus Lyons started taking missionary brothers out on evangelistic hitchhiking trips, three-day trips. They would walk out of Evansville on a Thursday morning with a sign that said “Terre Haute” or some other town, and they would come back in time to open the Lord’s Day on Saturday evening. That meant there were certain restraints on the distance they could travel in that amount of time. They’ve made seven trips since July. Rus will give the first sharing about them.

Rus Lyons:

The People of Praise moved in next door to my fraternity house when I was going to the University of Minnesota, and that’s how I got connected with the community. I’ve been doing mission work in Indianapolis and Evansville since 2007.

It was overcast when we got dropped off in Rockport, Indiana. Peter Coleman, Joe Bulger and I decided to share words we’d received. We had just finished a prayer time, which is what we do before we go out to do some mission work. We don’t really have a script, because we rely on the Lord to give us what to say.

Joe had a word to talk about the Holy Spirit and a word to “speak simply. The people you are going to go to today are already prepared.” So with that we hit the streets and were led to one house, and to another house farther away, and then to another house farther in.

But no one was answering the door until we get to a house where a young woman comes out--Eve--and we say, “The Lord sent us here to Rockport to talk about the Holy Spirit.”

She says, “Well, we’re Pentecostal.”

So we said, “You all probably know about the Holy Spirit,” and her husband, Adam, comes up and says, “Yeah, we got baptized in the Spirit last weekend. Do you want to come in?”

He invites us in and we sit down. He’s in his early 30s, thin, and a pretty mellow guy. Eve is a little shorter than he is, with long brown hair. They were both looking for work right then.

So, we often have these ten-minute personal prayer times where we each ask the Lord, “What do you want to do, Lord?” Then we wait. So we did that, and then after that Adam says, “You know, while I was praying, there’s this speech that I have to give and it keeps coming to mind, and the Lord said, ‘Give glory to me.’ I have to give a speech tonight before some prosecutors and judges about the faith-based rehab program which my wife and I were saved in. We gave our lives to God and got free of drugs, and these prosecutors and judges are wondering: Do these things work? Are these programs doing any good?”

We talked a little bit about that, and he invited us to stay for the night so we went out to do some more mission work and we left him to work on his talk. And while we were walking around Rockport, nobody else wanted to hear about God. Nobody else. We arrived back a little bit before dinner. We were actually going to have a free dinner! It was awesome.

That night Adam gets up there in front of all these judges and prosecutors and organizers and says, “There is one reason I am standing here before you clean. The Lord Jesus Christ.” And he just took that meeting for God. He glorified the Lord. The next day, he dropped us off on our way to Tell City and said, “My wife and I were talking and we have never had a prayer time like that before. We want to do that every day, and you have always got a place to stay in Rockport. Please come back.”