I made my first visit to Liverpool’s red light district last Friday night.

I was daft enough to type that first sentence in my office and leave the screen open in the middle of the afternoon before popping to the canteen, but I can confirm it had nothing to do with any of the potential reasons one of my particularly helpful colleagues suggested.
It was my first night as part of Heaven’s Kitchen, a fortnightly enterprise run by my church, which sees sandwiches, hot drinks, crisps and squash handed out to anybody and everybody who happens to pass by our stand.
I’ve been asked umpteen times in the last week ‘what was it like?’ and to be truthful I don’t know how to answer that question. I was scared before going, never having been to a red light district before, but I had no reason to be. Whether that had anything to do with it being a quiet night, or God putting my mind at rest, I don’t know, but the ladies and gentlemen we spent time talking to were just normal, extremely friendly people who were in the positions they were in not through choice but through a combination of circumstance and misfortune.
I hope I’m not patronising them when I say that it certainly felt as if I was doing God’s work in an extremely real way, doing something that needed to be done for no other reason than that. I will certainly be doing it again.

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