The Power of Proximity: Staying Close to God and People

Welcome back, friends. I’m so glad that you’re joining us from all over the globe today. Now, I hope you’re ready to be inspired because we have a special episode that I know is going to fuel your passion for Jesus. I do hope that you’ll share this episode with a friend because we’re not meant to do this life alone.
If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode and can be part of the amazing community that we’re building together. I am so excited to introduce you to one of my very, very dear friends, Hosanna Wong. She’s a best-selling author, a devoted wife, an exceptional wordsmith, a compassionate and profound evangelist, and she really models so beautifully what it looks like to live a life fully surrendered to Jesus in every sphere of life. I cannot wait till dive into today’s conversation. I know you’re going to love it.
All right, my friend. I’ve been waiting for this. um one of my favorite people in the world. Truly, you and I are I just say we’re like honestly same heartbeat, same passion. Uh it is not often I come across that. And just before we jumped on, we were talking so much about our love for California.
Now, people would think you’re crazy, Hosanna Wong, that you love California because people think to live here, you got to be crazy, let alone to love this state. So, I want to hear just a little bit of your history and why why do you love California when so many people don’t? Um, I would not disagree with that that you have to be a little bit crazy. Amen. And amen. Well, I grew up born and raised in San Francisco um on the streets of San Francisco.
My I grew up in a in a city slicker family. So, I grew up my dad was um a heroin addict for 15 years. He fought in a Chinese gang, had bullet holes alongside his calves from the last time he ran from the police, from the last time he robbed some place. And a woman introduced him to Jesus, and Jesus changed his whole life.
And my dad ended up starting an outdoor outreach to our friends living without homes and battling with addiction on the streets of San Francisco. Wow. And that’s where I grew up. That’s how we held church two to three days a week, an outdoor church in the middle of the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. People brought their alcohol bottles. People brought their dirty needles. And that’s how I learned church. Yeah.
I learned later in life when other people said they were also raised in church. We weren’t talking about the exact same thing. But that’s where I learned that Jesus could save anyone’s soul and redeem anyone’s story and use anyone that would say yes. And so that was kind of my background of the church. Um, and it’s also how I got into spoken word poetry.
All my friends on the streets did it. All my friends communicated through some kind of oral storytelling or hiphop. And so when I fell in love with Jesus, I just use spoken word poetry as the way to communicate with my friends. It was the thing we had in common. Um, now I just I feel like I just get to do that with more friends.
Find the thing that people have in common with you and then use that as a way to share about Jesus. Um, but I just think because I’m from California, God gave me a unique lens of California and um, I’ve just seen so many people far from God come to know him.
I could I can’t not believe that God can do big things um, in our state which and I love your passion and your passion for evangelism. I remember when you wrote your book on evangelism. I’m like, well, no one right now is writing books on evangelism and no one is I go the worst job in the church right now is an evangelist.
By that I mean that people think, okay, um why are you evangelizing? So, here we are. It’s 2025. We’re recording this. I want to know why you’re still so committed to evangelism and mission. how how you’ve kept your passion hot and on fire for keeping the first thing first and the main thing the main thing um you know as God sort of increased your platform and gave you more opportunity.