HerstoryGirl: Giving Your Heart

It has taken me most of the weekend to recover from Friday ;^) but it's a good kind of exhaustion.

As you know, Friday we had our Valentine's Midnight Outreach and we started bright and early, Friday morning.
I was at Sam's Club when the doors opened at 7 am to buy the 150+ roses for the outreach. Then, I met with a young mothers' play group at 9:30 to de-thorn and tag each one of the roses. We snipped thorns, tied on HPC cards, and curled ribbons for more than an hour.

I went home for a brief respite before I had to meet the rest of the team at a club we've never gone into before. This is probably the "biggest" club in the Baton Rouge area -- not in terms of square footage, but in terms of working girls and (sadly) patronage.
We have been trying to get in for several years, but all we have ever done before was leave the roses and chocolates at the door with the bouncers.

Well, on Friday afternoon, they actually let us come in to decorate the girls' dressing room! It was a pretty large room so we left balloons and roses and flower petals, chocolates and candy hearts and chocolate-dipped strawberries. And we wrote on the mirrors:

"HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY FROM HEALING PLACE CHURCH"

We also gave them a bunch of gifts -- earrings from the Mom's lifegroup & cute water bottles and makeup cases that were left over from our Live The Dream Women's Conference.

We met a couple of hours later to go decorate the dressing rooms of our other two "regular" clubs, then met again at 8 pm to go to the clubs and hand out roses to the ladies.
It's always so amazing to me how warmly they receive us -- the incredible favor that is granted us. And it seems that we always manage to touch someone's heart.

One young girl who was getting ready to work, asked us, "Who are you all? Why are you doing this?"
When we told her that we were the church and we just wanted her to know that she was loved and valued, she was visibly shocked. It was her 4th day on the job. Who knows the long-term impact of that encounter?

To me, this is what Valentine's Day should really be about: Giving your heart -- a heart for Christ -- to those who have never known His love. It's about showing them they are VALUABLE and worthy to be loved. It's not about preaching or shaming or acting "holier than thou..."

It's about being the hands and feet of Jesus.

It's just one small part of the Servolution.