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Editor's Note: This final profile in Today's Christian's series of "15 Believers Everyone Should Know" is about a woman who is trying to follow Christ in a very difficult environment. We include her because she symbolizes, in an extreme way, the need for each of us to live out our faith in a fallen world, and the difficulty of making choices in the brokenness of our culture. As theologian and pastor M. Craig Barnes has observed, "True spirituality must always exist within our ordinary, compromised, and ambiguous lives." Many believers face compromising situations: the clerk at Borders who must sell music that celebrates violence against women; the public–school teacher who must include a curriculum he doesn't agree with in his classroom lessons. Frankly, our staff struggled with this story because, as the subject herself says, "Sometimes I feel like I'm on the wrong side." Should she even be in this place? What does it mean to follow Christ's model of "eating with sinners" and reaching out to the lost? Read her story, then get together with others and discuss our questions at the end of the article.

Lee's Liquor Bar is a simple, camel brown storefront in downtown Minneapolis with an art deco neon sign, lots of cigarette smoke, and songs like "Blue Bayou" pouring out of the eaves. It's the sort of bar that was prevalent on skid rows across Middle America during the thirties and forties. And like the rest of these aged little honky–tonks, there's a real subculture at work inside.

A tightly knit clique of swing and ballroom dancers come to dance to the live music, drink bottled water, and sit at a cluster of tables near the dance floor; people sitting on the stools at the bar come there to drink; a select group of career alcoholics live above the bar and barter cleaning services for rent and a bar tab, and right in the middle of all of it is the bartender, Claire Hagen.

Claire is well spoken, matter of fact, and with her vintage dresses, Betty Page bangs, and red lipstick, she fits right into the rockabilly crowd. But regular attendees know she's doing more than pouring drinks–she's serving spirits.

I've been a regular attendee at Lee's since I took up ballroom dancing four years ago. On one Monday night, in–between cha–cha–cha's, I noticed Claire talking to a gruff man with a filthy, ragged coat who looked like he'd been sleeping under the bridge half a block away. He dumped change out of his pockets and onto the bar, looked at her, and said, "What can I buy for this?"

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