His breath reeking of alcohol, a grizzled, rheumy-eyed old man wearing a torn high-school letter jacket sticks out his hand and slurs through some monologue about bus money. His story sounds cockamamie, and your street wisdom tells you where a donation would likely go. Maybe you should offer to take him to a restaurant or rescue mission. But you shake your head, thrust your hands into your pockets, and keep walking.
You bump into people like him whenever you go downtown, but rationalization soon papers over any lingering guilt. After all, you have important business to tend to. And other people specialize in ministry to street people—maybe you’ll contribute some money to them.
Even so, you wonder, What would a person look like who took literally Jesus’ sweeping commands and acted on them? What would a Good Samaritan look like in urban America in 1989?
Such a person might look like Louise Adamson. She is a missionary, but not a typical missionary. She is more like a full-time Good Samaritan.
She sits in a cramped office of an aging Presbyterian church in the shadow of the Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. The furniture is government-issue hand-me-down. The carpet smells like the scrapings off the soles of 30 years’ worth of shoes. Louise is in her sixties. She has an ample nose, strong, straight teeth, a pitted complexion, a full head of graying hair. She is wearing a simple purple dress that could have come out of any decade but this one. Her voice cracks as she talks, giving the impression that she is on the verge of tears.
Louise talks nonstop. In response to a simple, “Louise, tell me about yourself,” she is still going 45 minutes later, recounting her life in the rather odd lilt of an Old Testament prophet. “I am like Gideon, the least of the house of Manasseh, called out of a cornfield, a cotton patch.” The cotton patch in question lay in north Georgia, which is where Louise grew up.
She changes topics a few times, but eventually circles back to her health complications in childhood—and the beginnings of her calling to ministry.
A Massive Sea Of Suffering
“I had double pneumonia three times before I reached the age of six, and a black couple would come to relieve my parents’ nursing duties. (Our house had absolutely no racial prejudice.) One night my lung collapsed, my eyes rolled back in my head, and no one thought I would make it through the night. A neighbor offered to dig my grave. But—I believe it was a miracle—I woke up in the middle of the night, started breathing, and announced I wanted com bread and cabbage. I still remember what Mother said: ‘Louise, you’re not your own. God saved you for a purpose. Seek it out.’ ”
The tears start coming. The memory has triggered a deep emotional response in Louise.
“Is that when you felt called to serve God?” Immediately Louise demonstrates her unconventional hermeneutics. “You know how Isaiah 40 says ‘Wait upon the Lord’? Well, I’ve taken that as my motto. I want to wait on the Lord like a waitress waiting on tables. I want to serve him every day.” And suddenly she has leaped forward 20 years and is talking about her student days in Atlanta.
In the 1940s, while working full-time and going to evening school three nights a week, Louise volunteered for mission work in the slums of Atlanta—black neighborhoods with colorful names like Buttermilk Bottom and Cabbagetown. “I would hold Bible clubs for the children. Most of the houses were built on stilts or concrete blocks, and when it rained we would sweep aside the cobwebs and climb underneath the houses to hold our meetings. It was there that God opened up to me the great face of missions—the heartache, the need. In Atlanta was the greatest slum south of Chicago,” she remembers, “a massive sea of suffering.”
Louise has a detailed inner map of the changing sociology of the city, vastly different from what you might read in a sociology textbook. It goes like this: “In the 1950s, the inner city began to envelop the main churches. God was standing there saying to us, ‘Don’t run! Stay! I have brought the masses to you.’
“But we didn’t stay, most of us. We ran. And so in the sixties rioters started burning those cities down. God wanted his people to lower the racial barriers, to overcome the differences, to open the doors. If we wouldn’t do it on our own, others would do it for us.
“And then in the seventies God said, ‘The church hasn’t met the challenge of the fifties and the sixties, so I’ll move on with my Spirit in my own way.’ That’s when the Jesus movement broke out, and there came a new outpouring of God’s Spirit. God was so far ahead of us that many people never have caught up.”
During those decades, Louise tried not to get left in the dust. She had found a husband in seminary, where she was taking classes herself, and he took the pastorate at a large inner-city church in a “changing neighborhood” in the late sixties “Those were dark times,” she remembers, “when we wondered if God had abandoned the city.”
Four years later Louise’s husband died. She stayed on in the neighborhood, living on a modest income provided through the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board. In the 1970s, she mostly worked with children, teaching 500 a week in Bible classes. Soon she was distributing food and clothing, appearing at Juvenile Court as a character witness, visiting hospitals and prisons. If Louise came across children from abusive families, she would ask their parents to let the children move in with her. In this way, she has been “mother” to some 14 children.
Soon a Presbyterian church opened its doors to her ministry. “They gave me their keys and said, ‘You can bring anybody you want into our church—black, yellow, prostitute, alcoholic, anybody.’ Isn’t it marvelous how God provides?”
A Banquet Late At Night
The Presbyterian church finally closed down after its congregation had shrunk to a few dozen members. They asked Louise to keep using the building, hoping that her presence might discourage vandalism. She practically moved into the old sanctuary, holding Bible classes there, teaching unwed mothers, giving shelter to the homeless. Eventually, a few young Christians with a social conscience moved into the neighborhood, and the church revived. “You see,” Louise says triumphantly, “God never left this place! He was here all along.”
All afternoon Louise tells stories. As the sun starts to drop below the tree line outside, you feel moved and inspired, but Louise has given only the vaguest picture of how she spends her time. Does she just wake up in the morning and wait for the phone to ring?
“Morning? No, no, it usually rings at night. Let’s see—yesterday. A mother I’d been working with called me around supper time. I went right over and found her sitting in the middle of the floor with bruises all over her face. Her husband had been beating her again. She had a big bottle of prescription medicine beside her on the floor, and she told me she’d been fighting all day not to take an overdose. I had brought some groceries with me, so we cooked dinner and spent two hours cleaning house together. By the end of that time we were singing hymns as we worked.
“When I got home, I got another call. Three elderly people had been shut up in a house for three days without food. My first response was, ‘Lord, I’m tired. I want to go to bed.’ But I went to the store and dragged the groceries I bought up two flights of stairs to their apartment. Somewhere around the second-floor landing, it was like God gave me a shot of vitamin B-12. I spent three hours with those lovely ladies. We had a banquet in the middle of the night. I was so excited I could hardly fall asleep when I went home.”
What about burnout? “Well, sure, I get tired, and sometimes discouraging things happen, like last year when my house was broken into three times. When it gets too bad I head up to the farm in North Georgia for a week or so. But Jesus said to seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you.” Louise is crying again, and when she stops, she tells stories until the sun disappears and the lights come on, and it is time to go.
Louise Adamson is a true eccentric. Her house blends well into the neighborhood she serves: old sofas clutter the front porch (simply waiting for placement with needy refugees). Beat-up cars sit on the front lawn (soon to be donated to poor families). She does not fit the pattern of any minister or social worker you know. She issues no tax-deductible receipts to donors (although for years she has saved all her own receipts—in a large pasteboard box in her living room). If you asked her about a five-year—even a five-day—plan, she would stare at you blankly. She simply wakes up each day and asks God to use her.
Meanwhile, in universities sociologists analyze the cycle of dependency in the underclass. In seminaries, urban specialists devise strategies to address the problems of the inner city. Task forces in major cities study the crisis of the homeless. These programs will soak up billions of dollars, and years will pass before results begin to show.
It occurs to you, as you guide your car onto an expressway ramp that curves around the stadium, that if every Christian in Atlanta responded to the gospel like Louise, the city would be very different. And you find yourself longing for more eccentrics.
By Philip D. Yancey.
