All it takes is switching a small trigger to blow up a building. Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium was built in 1966 to serve as the home of baseball’s Atlanta Braves, and football’s Atlanta Falcons. In August of 1997, the stadium was demolished.
The entire stadium was brought down with the turn of a switch. Of course the switch had a wire that was connected to a series of explosives that had been placed throughout the building. The switch was not powerful. The switch released the power.
Our faith does not need to be huge to be powerful. Our faith releases God’s power – and God can move mountains into the sea. God can heal a marriage. God can help a depressed man find joy. God can deliver a woman from cancer. God can change a life. But we have to go from saying “God can” to say “God will…”
“Faith is not believing that God can, but that God will!”
— Abraham Lincoln, Christian Reader, Vol. 33, no. 2.
For faith to have any power- you have to hit the switch – step out on your faith. Move forward on God’s promises.
If you met Willie McLean at the age of 27, you might not give him a chance.
Willie McLean grew up in Harlem – NYC. Willie started off horribly in junior high by getting his girlfriend pregnant–the twelve-year-old daughter of a New York City cop. When Elise gave birth to the baby, her parents tried to keep things quiet … Until the next year, when the young couple did it again!
This time the irate father had Willie arrested for statutory rape. In front of the Family Court judge, however, the thirteen-year-old Elise–just released from her second trip to the maternity ward –pled with tears on Willie’s behalf. He got off with a suspended sentence …. !
By his junior year of high school, Willie had dropped out, preferring to spend his days in the pool rooms of Harlem or out with the street hustlers. He was fascinated with their brand-new cars, glittering jewelry, and the ever-present attractive women.
He said to one of them one day, Man! Nice stuff you’ve got here. ”
“Well, son, ” The man replied, “If you want what I got, you gotta do what I do. ” And thus came the teenager’s first opportunities, to work in the numbers racket, taking bets and collecting profits. He also began stealing cars.
At age seventeen Willie started experimenting with drugs. Of course, the hustlers had warned him, “If you’re going to be good at this business, you can’t use drugs.
But Willie didn’t follow the instructions. Acid, speed, cocaine, and especially heroin became common. In the “Shooting galleries, ” He watched more than one guy die from a “Hot shot”–A free dose from the dealer that was actually a punishment for snitching. The white powder looked like heroin, but it was really rat poison or battery acid.
“It seemed like I could not stop going to jail, ” Willie remembers. “I kept getting ninety days for this, sixty days for that: writing ‘numbers’… Trespassing.., Disorderly conduct… Shoplifting from Macy’s. It seemed like the streets just kept calling my name …. ”
Eventually, twenty-one counts of armed robbery led to a ten-year sentence. As Willie talks about these days, it seems as if the jail times are so numerous they have begun to run together in his mind. Rikers Island here in the city, then upstate to Sing-Sing, then Greenhaven, then farther north to Clinton-Dannemora, forty miles from Canada, then Comstock (called “Gladiator School” At the time), and finally Walkhill.
One scary night in Clinton, however, is crystal-clear. A big, muscular inmate who was serving a life sentence with no hope of parole had begun befriending Willie, leaving candy, sodas, and cigarettes on his bunk. How nice, Willie thought.
But then one day the man announced, “Yo, I have some gambling debts to pay, and so I’m gonna need my money by tomorrow. You owe me forty-five dollars for all this stuff I’ve been providing you. ”
“Well, ” Said Willie, quickly sizing up the situation, “I don’t have it now, but I’ve got some money coming in the mail. I’ll pay you as soon as it arrives. ”
“No, you didn’t hear me, ” The man replied in a steely voice. “I said tomorrow. And if you don’t have it, you’re gonna be ‘my kid. ‘”
The thought of providing forced homosexual service to this man terrified Willie. He stayed up all night, pacing back and forth in his six-by-eight cell, scared to death. The cellblock was buzzing with talk about what would go down next.
When the doors clanked open at five-thirty the next morning, Willie seized the initiative. Grabbing a mop bucket in the corridor, he bashed the guy over the head, opening a fountain of blood. Guards came running to tackle Willie, spraying him in the face with Mace and clubbing him into submission.
Willie was returned to court once again, this time on a charge of attempted murder. More time was added to his sentence ….
When Willie finally got out of prison in 1976, Elise and the two children were amazingly still waiting for him. The couple got married at last, over the strong protest of her family.
But the angry twenty-seven-year-old Willie was still out of control. Once when a man pulled a knife on him in the street, Willie grabbed the knife by the blade, slicing his finger badly. Elise came to see him in the hospital–and happened to show up just as a girlfriend named Renee was also making her call!
Willie refused to let his wife into the room. But the two women met in the lobby, and Elise asked to visit her home. She had heard about a new baby and wanted to investigate whether it belonged to Willie. Once she arrived, Elise was shocked to see an undeniable match for her husband’s face.
Willie’s own father advised Elise, “You better get as much insurance on him as you can, because he isn’t going to last long …. ”
One of Willie’s daughters died from diabetes; Willie became all the more violent. He stole $20,000 in drugs from a supplier, sold them, and used the money to enter the prostitution business.
Before long, the drug supplier figured out who the culprit was and put out a contract on Willie’s life. Willie was making a call at a public phone booth one day when, all of a sudden, bullets started flying. Willie twisted in first one direction and then the other as a 9mm bullet bounced off the phone and into his face. Passing through his tongue, the bullet split his jaw. Meanwhile, another bullet entered his shoulder from the back.
Lying on the street, watching his blood run toward the gutter, Willie prayed (a Mustard Seed prayer) for one of the few times in his life: “God, please don’t let me go out like this.”
When Elise, who had recently started attending our church, came to visit him in the hospital this time, she just stared. She showed no emotion at all.
“Aren’t you going to cry? ” Willie asked.
“No, I’m gonna pray for you. You need Jesus bad …. “
Willie was 27. But Willie McLean was not yet ready to change. He met another girlfriend named Brigitte, who bore him two more children in the coming years. Brigitte’s incensed mother tried to have him killed as well, but Willie managed to charm the designated gunmen into leaving him alone.
He did not fare so well with the police in Jamaica, Queens, however, after they photographed him from a rooftop making a drug sale. When he was brought before the grand jury, a cold sweat settled over him. Everything is falling apart, he told himself. I’m headed back to jail for how long? Five years? More?
The sentence this time was a year on Rikers Island plus five years’ probation.
And that was the point when Elise finally managed to get her thirty-nine-year-old husband to our church. He had long pushed her away with excuses: no money for the offering, no clothes that would look right. But this time he gave in.
“The choir began singing that day, ” He recalls, “And I just opened up. My nose started running, and then I was actually crying!
“Then Pastor Cymbala started speaking. It seemed like, with all those people in the building, he was talking right to me. This guy somehow knew all my business! ”
He turned to his wife. “Elise, did you tell him about me? ” “No–honestly, I didn’t say anything. ” Before Willie knew it, an invitation to come to Christ began. Willie found himself moving forward, tears beclouding his vision. At the front of the church he spread out his arms and cried, “O God–I just can’t take it anymore. I can’t go on …. “
That was the beginning of a new life for this hardened criminal. “Even though I knew I was soon going back to jail, ” He says, “A ton of weight fell off my shoulders that day. ” He kept coming to church right up until it was time to report to Rikers Island.
During the year in prison, Willie acted on his faith which had increased – asked God to free him from methadone–the drug replacement that counselors had been providing him for fifteen years to try to curb his appetite for heroin. In response to prayer, the detoxification process that should have taken years was completed in ten weeks. Soon Willie was out–and this time stayed clean.
Before another year passed, we had hired him to work in the maintenance department at the Brooklyn Tabernacle. He was clearly a new creation in Christ.
Today Willie explains in his soft-spoken voice, “The Lord didn’t just save me–he delivered me. He mended my marriage. He gave back my self-esteem. My son Michael, who would never speak to me, began to respect me.
My father saw what God did for me and, after all these years, began to serve the Lord, too. My sister, who had been in prostitution, gave her heart to the Lord.
“My brother-in-law, who was taking advantage of his young stepdaughters, called me one day and was feeling so guilty he was ready to hang himself. But I began ministering to him. Today he’s serving the Lord, singing in the Men’s Chorus at the Brooklyn Tabernacle.
“God has turned my life inside out. He has blessed me and my family incredibly.”
From Fresh Wind, Fresh Power by Jim Cymbala, 67-75.