All Saints' Day

Forty-one years ago today, God took away my blindness to Marxist evil and proceeded to change my life. There’s nothing exceptional in that. Every Christian is a saint who was a sinner, some more notoriously so than others.

Fifteen years ago, Philadelphia police told me I should cross the river from their city and visit the two worst streets in Camden, N.J., to see what a poor neighborhood completely given over to drugs looked like. I did, and I encountered a surprise. Yes, just about every house was trashed, but one had an immaculate yard surrounded by a white picket fence.

I knocked on the door, wanting to interview whoever lived there, but no one responded. I never did find out who lived there, but over the years I’ve read reports on how those two worst Camden streets have been fruitless and multiplied, becoming 20 or 200. Late last year Rolling Stone called Camden “Apocalypse, New Jersey. … America’s most desperate town,” and CBS labeled it “the most dangerous city in the country.”

I wondered whether that white picket fence, or any hope, remained. I also wondered why reporters were often so pack-like in gnawing the bones of bad news. The Nation recently typified the press tendency by calling Camden a “City of Ruins,” quoting an old woman praying, and juxtaposing that implicitly useless activity with “bodies out back. Bodies upstairs. People stabbed.”

WORLD, to the chagrin of some readers, offers up bad news more regularly than they or we would like—but we’re always looking for redemptive aspects as well. Our feature this summer about one Camden ministry, Seeds of Hope (a finalist for the 2014 Hope Award for Effective Compassion), described how Bill and Brenda Antinore were once a successful lawyer/high school teacher couple. They then descended into cocaine addiction and prison before ascending to a faith in Christ that propelled them to establish a ministry to prisoners, prostitutes, and the poor.

God, in short, transformed their lives, and they’ve helped to transform many others. I don’t know whether the white picket fence I saw is still there, but Camden has something even better, a ministry like Seeds of Hope with an open door for the desperate. Praise God from Whom all blessings flow.