It is the start of the season on Coney Island, Memorial Day Weekend, 2008. The candy apple stands and the flume rides are running. The vendors vend. The Wonder Wheel and its minion wheels are spinning. The air smells like burning popcorn and sugar, cigarettes and sand. Everything glows as if it had always been this way — always thriving, churning.
However, passing by here a week ago, the boardwalk was a ghost town. Only the heavy-set Russian Polar Bear Club members were on the beach in their swimsuits, several homeless drug addicts leaned against benches until cops shooed them away, and the owners stands were padlocked shut with corrugated metal grates. Coney Island looked like the press says it looks now — grim, seedy, about to get torn down to develop condos.
However — just look at it today — it is reinvigorated, as if nothing had ever happened.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Anne Babson. I am a Christian writer, a girly girl, a new resident of this neighborhood half-condemned, half-celebrated. This blog will be my window to others into one Christian walk along the boardwalk, sidewalk, and stairwell climbs of the toughest borough in the toughest city in the country.
So what does the reinvigoration of Coney Island’s boardwalk have to do with Christianity?
A Presbyterian minister might give a homily on the notion of resurrection from the tomb. Indeed, that which looked so grim is now grinning. The abandoned is crowded. Christians are supposed to think that even our Lazarus things — those which have started to stink for being so very dead — can return to fullness of life. We are to pray for resurrection in all its forms.
For me personally, this revival of The Cyclone, Coney Island’s wooden roller coaster, is a sign that my own prayers for resurrection in my own life are being answered. Christian writers are not supposed to get divorced, but I have just fled a marriage that spit me out, and I floated up here on the beach with a bunch of seaweed and trash that was pecked on by the seagulls — discarded waste. But that’s not how God sees me. He sees me fully resurrected, able to thrive again, living and loving with total abandon, more and more the way He loves and He lives despite being rejected by so many people.
I buy a corn dog and sit at a table. The three men at the table next to me are speaking Arabic. They watch with great interest as a woman, obviously drunk, on a dare from her friends a few yards from us, runs into the ocean fully clothed, and runs back to receive a beer from each of them.
This place needs prayer.
Fortunately for all of us, a local church, Fellowship Baptist at 2929 West 20th Street, off of Surf Avenue, right around here, has a prayer station. They wear the red and white vests that YWAM manufactures and sells to ministries, hand out Bible tracts in Spanish, Russian, and English — but wish while I stand there that they also hand them in Bengali and Arabic, among other languages. They feed the poor and minister significantly to the addicted, and they have no head pastor — only three elders, amateur Christians, amateur meaning that they do what they do not for money but for love. While I stand there, a man admits in a heavy Russian accent that he is a heroin addict. One elder pulls him aside, makes an appointment to see him the next morning. A Muslim couple, the man with a full beard and skull cap, the woman with her head fully covered, comes over out of curiosity, then leaves. A police officer asks for prayers of protection — in this tough neighborhood, they need such prayers, the cops. A man from Bengladesh comes up to get a hug from a big, burly elder, barely speaks English, probably doesn’t understand half of what is said to him, but he does understand the message, “Welcome,” which has not heretofore been uttered to him since he arrived in the US two months ago.
I ask for prayer, too. The kind sister who prays for me listens briefly to my war stories, then starts praying for my husband to reconcile with me, but she doesn’t know that he threatened my life, expressed repeated, scary wishes for my death. I don’t enlighten her. God knows the ghost town my life has become. God also knows that this is my season for revival, and soon I, through the resurrection power of our Savior, will look like the boardwalk, as if nothing had ever gone horribly wrong.
