Conduit June 15- Place of Hope

If you’re Lindsay or Brittany and you find yourself hooked on drugs and/ or alcohol after you call your publicist , you head out to a resort style detox center and begin plotting your comeback. The biggest decisions are should you call Oprah or Barbara first.

If you’re poor and in the same situation your monumentally screwed. You can walk into an emergency room and say the magic words “I’m feeling suicidal” and they have to take you in. But it’s just a band aid solution. The church isn’t very well suited for the combination of a spiritual and medical battle that is addiction.

If you’ve ever witnessed or personally battled with addiction you are familiar with the sense of hopelessness that comes alongside it. The starts and stops, the failures and successes, the lost and found moments are all part of the slide. You’ve seen how it can seem like you’ve finally beaten it, only to see it start over again.

It’s easy to sit and throw rocks of blame. It’s seems so simple that they did this to themselves. Of course if you’re a child and it’s your single parent that “did it to themselves” as best you can tell you just want your mommy back. It can all seem quite hopeless. But it’s not.

God chose an alcoholic named Mike Coupe as a messenger of hope. Mike had his own battle with alcoholism and through Christ he defeated it. 2 Corinthians 2:4 says that God comforts us in our troubles SO THAT we can comfort those in any troubles with the same comfort we ourselves have received. The very thing the enemy meant for harm in Mike and his families lives God has used for good. If Satan had only known, I’m assuming he would have left Mike alone.

God interrupted Mike’s life with an idea that He could be used by the Lord to make a difference in someone’s life, to change someone’s personal history. Alongside Dr. John Brown, Mike started Place of Hope in Columbia, TN over 10 years ago. That idea has since become a sixty-four bed facility that according to their website “provides quality care for adult men and women and their families, throughout the Middle Tennessee region.”

Place of Hope also includes a temporary shelter for the homeless and a daily hot meal for the hungry and elderly. In addition, they collect, recycle, and give away clothing, furniture, and household goods to the poor. In His first public declaration of ministry, Jesus stood up and read from Isaiah. It was like Jesus "mission statement". Included in that statement was a promise to bring liberty to the captives and to preach the gospel to the poor. Mike lives this out every day.

Conduit financially supports 3 different ministries. Place of Hope is one of them. We are blessed to be one of their largest donors. We are an active part of the supply line to the troops on the front lines right here in our own back yard.

Mike will be joining us tomorrow night at Conduit to share the story of Place of Hope. It’s a fascinating journey filled with testimonies of God providing time and time again. I’m always inspired after spending time around Mike. He’s a perfect example of what can happen when someone like you or I just simply surrender to the call of God on our lives.

He takes ordinary people and does extraordinary things.

We’ll be starting at 7:30pm in the Theater at Journey Church in Franklin.

I hope you can join us.

Darren

You can see more about Place of Hope at www.placeofhope.us

www.darrentyler.com