Searching and Finding

Three weeks following my wife’s death, I took a volunteer job as a community chaplain in Kensington — the worse part of Philadelphia, PA. On the job, I prayed for addicts and spoke to them a little about Jesus. I also fed them and waited for the AR2 unit to take them to detox.
One day, a mother came to me. She had travelled from Pittsburgh, which is about four and half hours from Philadelphia, and she carried with her a photograph of her son who was missing. He was around nineteen or perhaps twenty years old, and she said that he’d been missing for a month and had last been seen in the Kensington area. I told her that I would help and go out looking for him after work, which I did.
A couple of nights previously, a body had been found outside a nearby pharmacy parking lot, cut into pieces. The night before that, a woman had been strangled to death in the same area. I was keen to finding the missing man before anything bad happened to him, so, feeling like a detective, I searched for him during my lunch breaks too. I asked known addicts and dealers if they’d seen him; none had.
The first place I went was McPherson Park which the drug addicts call it needle Park but us pastors calls it Prayer Park. The Mayor of Philadelphia does not care for the Kensington part of Philadelphia. A couple of women said he looked cute. Someone did say that he might have been at AA, so I went there, but no one had seen him. I spoke to poor souls with the needle in the vein and others who said they’d tie him up if they found him and then let me know. Someone else said they thought they’d seen him, but his face was torn up, and he had red marks across his body like he was in bad shape.

I couldn’t give up, but I was tired and needed a rest. I called his mother, and I told her I was going to take an hour’s break or two.
It was the time of Covid, but in Philadelphia, nobody, including me, really wore a mask. So as I went home and was about to open the door, I saw a guy walking in front of my house.
I decided to take a chance and show him the photograph, although I felt it was a long shot. I was probably wasting my time. But the guy also looked busted up with marks on his arms, so I thought he might be an addict and just might have seen our missing man. So I said, “Hey buddy, have you seen this guy?” “He said, ‘that’s me.” So I called his mother, and she was so happy, she fell into tears. If I only knew the Lord was going to bring him in front of my house, I would not have walked for about three or four hours looking for him. But the Lord has his ways that are far beyond our understanding.
After this event I cought Covid and was sick for 10 days , getting a fever of 104 to 105 the first day but it was wroth it. After my recovery I went looking for a other missing person this time hiting the streets at 5 am , interviewing many addicts but couldn't find the missing man.