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Fall on Your Knees: The Wet, Shirtless Jogger Wants to Pray with You
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You remember Ethan, right? The shirtless jogger from Chicago who flooded basements the nation over during a wet and wild storm?
Well, he loves him some Jesus and he wants to pray with you.
While a student at the Moody Bible Institute, Ethan Renoe founded a student-led ministry that offers "Free Prayers" to bargoers on Friday nights in various Chicago neighborhoods, including the gayborhood of Boystown.
Renoe can be seen, pre-beard (womp), discussing his motivations in the video below:
Four years after Renoe and a friend grabbed a pizza box and scrawled their offering of gratuitous graces, but the group is still going strong and is currently led by student Noah Reynolds, who says he focuses especially on Boystown to spread love to the gays--in a holy way.
"My primary purpose of going there is to show this community love that has been severely damaged by those who claim to be Christians," Reynolds told NBC Chicago. "That area has been hurt by people who claim Christ's name."
People like those funeral-picketing sonnuvaguns at the Westboro Baptist Church, from whom Reynolds is quick to distance himself and the ministry.
"Westboro Baptist is nearly the antithesis of what we are," he said. "Our message is a message of grace through faith. It doesn't matter how far you have fallen, Christ loved you enough to die for you to set you free."
Well, at least Renoe and his Free Prayers aren't a bunch of "all gays are going to hell" fanatics. They're just a couple of wet blankets.
Wrapped around a stick in the mud.
Of course, it's easy to forget that this country was founded on the basis of religious freedom so far be it from me to shit on someone for being religious. I do not, however, cotton to anyone who stands between me and a tequila soda on a Friday night.
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