St. Andrew’s teaches the power of prayer

Among those supporting the expansion of Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian

Church was a man praying with extreme devotion during the last

meeting at Newport Beach City Hall.

If you happened to be there, you couldn’t have missed him. He

isn’t the typical Newport Beach guy who likes to stand out.

He’s a simple man. His material life hasn’t changed very much

despite living in Newport Beach for many years. But his spiritual

life has had a major overhaul.

His name is Hector Alfaro. He and a close friend arrived in the

United States in June 1980 from El Salvador. When they reached Los

Angeles, Alfaro’s buddy moved to the city of Compton, but Alfaro

traveled farther south to settle in Costa Mesa, later ending up in

Newport Beach.

With no good Samaritan available to give him wise advice, Alfaro

started to live o7la vida loca f7in the heart of Costa Mesa. The

little money he earned doing odd jobs didn’t last very long. “I don’t

know what it was, but I would spend everything I made on silly

things,” he said.

Alfaro used to hang out in bars on the weekends to have fun with

his friends. As time went on, his drinking got out of control. “I was

doing it almost every day,” he said. After a while, he realized he

couldn’t live without alcohol. He turned into a heavy drinker, an

alcoholic.

He tried almost everything to stop his addiction. Like other

recovering alcoholics, he sought professional help, trying

alternative medicine and then ending up in a detox center in Costa

Mesa. Alcohol had gone so deep in his system that he began to

question his ability to recover. “I was about to give up,” he told

me.

One day, he desperately walked around his neighborhood looking for

a way to cure his ailing body. Then he remembered a few people who

helped out at the rehab center. They were volunteer workers from St.

Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, and one of them had invited him to

visit their place of worship.

Alfaro did just that. He drove his car straight to the church and

quickly went inside the main building, where a church service was

taking place.

He will never forget that day. He felt a special energy moving

into his body. It helped him fight back against his addiction. He

became an active member of the church, and after a few months, he

found a part-time job there as a custodian. Soon it turned into a

full-time position.

Now Alfaro wants to help other people in need. Once a month, he

travels to Tecate, Mexico, where his church helps a local orphanage.

His appetite for helping others doesn’t stop there. He also goes to

his native El Salvador almost every year during Christmas season to

give toys and other presents to poor families. “It helps my soul when

I do stuff like this,” he told me in Spanish.

When I heard him say that, I asked myself why he is able to get

such positive results with so little, and why our local communities

aren’t doing more to help those in need. Then I realized that’s

precisely what Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian Church is trying to do

today. Its expansion plan involves helping out a growing population

of teenagers and young adults.

Unfortunately, these kids have been left alone to the forces of

the market for an extended time. There is no doubt that most of us

are highly committed to a market economy. Because we truly believe in

it, we tend to forget its negative consequences. We only have to look

to ourselves, and particularly to our kids, to understand the full

extent of the problems we face.

Most parents today, because of high costs, have relatively few

choices about the education of their children. They often leave their

kids inside their own rooms, where they become easy targets for

messages conveyed by electronic devices developed by huge companies

such as Sony or Microsoft. These gadgets affect their creative

abilities and their social skills. A refrigerator filled with

unhealthy food only adds to the problem.

The church has a clear picture of this issue and would like to do

something about it. If Alfaro needed some special spiritual guidance

to redeem his soul, our kids need to get in physical shape before

achieving spiritual salvation.

That is why building a youth center makes sense.

Most governments today have trouble providing social programs to

the community, but nonprofit organizations have a better chance of

doing so.

I applaud the majority of Newport Beach City Council for realizing

those limitations, and for letting a nonprofit group help a segment

of the community.

* HUMBERTO CASPA is a Costa Mesa resident and bilingual writer. He

can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].