Where is the Gerasene Demoniac in your city?

 In Mark 5:1 Jesus shows us the downcast He seeks is often on the "other side". The other side of the tracks, the downtown skid row, the homeless camps, the "byways and hedges." He will be dwelling among the dead, not the physically dead, but those who have lost all in life worth living for. 

Those places where no one is able to reach him with the tug of matrimonial bonds, in fact he has even broken the chains of relationship with his own children. No love is strong enough to bring him to repentance. You see him constantly, day and night, walking among others that share his fate or hidden away from all in the lonely places of isolation. There he drinks away his bitter tears and lives in self-destructive patterns; sometimes displayed by addiction, or cutting or other self destructive behaviors, sometimes wailing and crying out in a drug induced psychosis, or deep and relentless anguish of heart. 

What can save this wretch of a man? Violent, lost in addiction, repugnant: no reason to live and no hope but further torment. 

Oh but there is one! 

One has made a long trip over rough seas into the heart of hell just to find this poor abandoned and neglected soul! The drama for his soul begins when he meets Jesus in the depths of his addiction, the years of demonic torment, emaciated in body and mind, he meets the Master face to face! 

Only Christ's power is able to subdue and breath life back into this repulsive looking man! But we are left with the parting scene where we see this man sitting down, clothed and in his right mind as Jesus sends him to share what He did for his soul. 

Who has a message so divine? Who knows a power that knows has limits? We do! The ambassadors of this Mighty Savior's love! May we never see anyone beyond His reach!