This is Maxwell, she currently is a prostitute. I followed her around for a few hours and literally filmed her on the corner until she got picked up and she told me, “well Isaac, I’ve got a date, I’ll see you later”.*
I went to her house, which was about 12x12 room, with couch, tv, bathroom. And as my rule for myself on the filming of this video, I gave her the only direction that I gave anyone “just do what you would do if I wasn’t here”. She then pulled out a faceless VCR and started fixing it, telling me that “it was a birthday present and she wanted to get it up and running again”.
When I saw that, I was blown away. Even the open mind that I thought I had towards prostitutes was opened even further. She has been such a pleasure to get to know and when I saw that VCR getting fixed, I saw a woman that is smarter than she knows. I saw her story in that VCR.
The VCR has been used, discarded, broken and unwanted. But she sees something more and took time into it to change it and make it new. I’ll bet that God gave her that VCR to show her how He feels about her.
In the middle of fixing up that old VCR, her song came on the radio and she had to get up and dance.
I should mention that when I was filming all of this, someone was shot a killed a few houses down from us. After I left, Tammi, who is smoking a cigarette and reading the Bible in the video, asked for a ride to a ‘community night’ a block away. I dropped her and her boyfriend off there and was asked to come in. It was a young family with two young kids, in the midst of this neighborhood, feeding anyone that would enter, from face tattoos to crackheads. After I met them and started to leave I heard them praying, while thinking “of course they’re Christians” and also thinking, these are the Christians you don’t hear about but should. They don’t have a facebook page you can ‘like’ or a Twitter account updating people on what they’re doing. They are just in it. They are loving people like Jesus told us to and not caring if people see them. But it’s usually the Christians that are doing it for their own glory are the ones you read about and frankly, that’s opposite of why we should do it and that’s why the Christians that should be on the frontlines and headlines are the ones that are too humble to do it.
*also, when filming Maxwell on the corner a car full of drug dealers got out and said “camera man has to go”. So I decided I should probably get going.
Here are some shots of Maxwell watching “Welcome to America” for the first time: