Another barrio. Another rutted, trash-strewn alley. Lots of sets of brown eyes peering at the gringo, and we pulled up to the rented house that is headquarters for a fledgling ministry to addicts that was birthed by the vision of a gang member, Marvin, who will gladly show you his belly where he was split from stem to stern by the knife of a rival gangster. It was in the hospital where an old man faithfully visited Marvin every day to tell him about Jesus that this gangster put down his knife, picked up the Sword of the Spirit—his Bible, caught fire for Jesus, and today leads derelicts back from the brink of death to a vibrant new life.

Marvin may be my favorite Nica. He’s rough. He doesn’t come shined up. But he knows Jesus changed his life and is changing the lives of others and he’s sure of it. Changed people, the truly born-again and saved from death are like that. Don’t confuse them with any high-falutin theological facts.

At the addiction ministry Marvin heads their only therapy is Jesus Christ. They don’t have 12 steps. They don’t sit in circles and talk about their problems. They pray. Then Marvin tells them Jesus will heal them and help them, and then they pray some more. It’s not that Marvin is against 12 steps. They just don’t have them. They don’t know much about psychology. They’ve only got One Step: Jesus Saves.  And as it turns out, that is all they need.

Marvin’s “Jesus Therapy” works. These men went around the room and each told their story. Invariably it was of chemical brokenness. They’d lost their families. One man told of how his children were too afraid of him to approach him and how it broke his heart. But then he lifted his hands toward Heaven, told me that Jesus had sobered him, restored him to his family, and that now his children would receive him. He hadn’t had a drink in eight months.

Marvin then stepped to a small marker board on the wall that listed out their daily regimen of prayer, Bible Study, praise, and reflection, and he drew a map of Nicaragua. He explained to me that there was a small struggling church in the Honduran border 300 km away and that next week he was taking two of the men to that town to go door to door telling the story of how Jesus had helped them, preaching every night in the community, and revitalizing the Christian witness in that town.

I wept. It would be hard to calculate how many millions of dollars worth of spiritual monuments exist in my town alone—-ostensibly occupied by evangelicals. There are enough ministers with advanced degrees to run several seminaries. We have conferences and seminars. We have libraries, books & radio stations. So much in the way of resources, and so little gets done; so few get saved.

Marvin? He’s got “Jesus Therapy.”

I want to be more like Marvin.

At the end of my time with the reclaimed addicts today they said they’d pray for me and asked what I needed from God. Through tears I told these young Spanish-speaking former punks and drunks exactly what I needed God to do in my life as I thought “I’d rather have these four guys praying for me than all the theologians in America!”

If I weren’t going to get to spend eight more hours teaching at Project Hope, and if I weren’t going to get to preach in one of Managua’s great churches tomorrow night, it would still have been worth coming just to sit with Marvin’s guys and hear about “Jesus Therapy.”