Douglas: A Hunger to Help

Douglas is focused on his faith and feeding others now.

FROM RECEIVING TO REACHING OUT

Douglas Hunton used to come to our outreaches to be served. Now he comes to do good deeds and to have a hand in helping others.

He quietly slipped into our Tulsa crowds a couple of years ago. As we became friends, he said he wanted to go further in his faith in Jesus Christ, so we set up extra times to focus solely on him.

Over several months in 2009, we talked a lot, celebrated his birthday, studied the Bible and challenged him to clean out his spiritual life of anything holding him back.

He explained how he was fighting a fear of lack, a fear of rejection and unforgiveness from relationships gone wrong. The result? Not much peace, not much joy, just trying to survive.

We prayed together, encouraged him to reconcile where he could and explained that God can do more than just help us get by – that He wants to give us abundance.

Mostly though, we kept asking these questions: What does God want to do next in your life? How can you serve Him? Have you discovered God’s plan for you?

Well, God watered those seeds we planted. Today, Doug’s life is bearing fruit that is blessing many others. We know it’s not what we said to him. It’s about how God stirred up his heart.

If you were looking for Doug on Feb. 17, you would have found him at Tulsa’s Day Center for the Homeless helping us and the caterer serve dinner.

If you were looking for him on March 5, you would have found him at our Friday outreach praying with us to see lives saved and lifted up.

You can actually find him almost any Friday shaking hands with people where we serve sack lunches, passing out the scriptures we speak about and welcoming people as they arrive.

Beyond all that, Doug asked us late last Fall to start giving our crowd a way to write down their prayer requests in case they weren’t comfortable talking about something in person.

The process gave us a gold mine of insight about those we serve. Prayers have since gone up for healing, family situations, employment and housing – all because Doug had a hunger to help.