evangelism outing

The other Saturday (April 13 I believe), we had an extreme faith challenge. We broke up into groups, and Esmi + Manuel were in mine. The three of us headed out with a list of insane ideas given to us by Josh. Some of them were: preach four times on public transport; ask God for a phone number and then call that number and pray for the person/minister to them; ask God for a name and then find that person and pray for them; invite someone out to lunch and use that time to minister to them; buy five red balloons, write encouraging notes on them and then give them to people from other countries; perform a drama or sketch in a public place; and various others. This immediately incited fear in me, especially the phone one, haha, because I dislike phone calls with strangers, especially in a language I’m learning. We didn’t wind up having time/money to do that one (call me a wimp if you like, haha), but we still had an amazing couple of hours.

The public transport we preached 3 times on were nothing more than a large van (literally, a mini bus), which was really neat because people can listen better and it’s a lot more intimate and personal. Manuel started out by sharing his testimony, how he had suffered in his teens from schizophrenia and God had healed him completely from it; Esmi continued by sharing the hope and change that God brings into your life and how through the sacrifice of Christ we have this opportunity; and I followed up by saying that if people wanted this change, this 360 degree turn, to repeat after me in prayer to accept Christ into their heart. It was neat because one of the ladies that talked to us afterward lives in the apartments close to the orphanage, so she knew of us and the people that work here at EV. The second time we preached, a boy of 17, Ricardo, asked if he could tag along with us for the day. We said absolutely ! So he came with us on our adventure, and had a lot of things in common with Manuel, studying piano and whatnot.

Buying and writing on the red balloons took a lot longer than we intended, but after we were finished, we headed to the central to hand them out. A lot of the foreigners spoke English (being from Europe), but also a lot of them thought we were trying to sell the balloons, or didn’t really want anything to do with a Bible verse on a balloon. The last balloon we gave to an old woman in a wheelchair, accompanied by her two daughters. We talked to them and prayed for their mother, and me and Esmi both saw white lights and felt the word “peace” on our hearts, which we shared with them. It was really neat. Then we went off to buy ice cream for a public worker who was sweeping, who accepted it gratefully. We were standing on the corner, looking at an article on a magazine, when a different older man stopped to talk to us for ten minutes, out of the blue. So we conversed with him, about news and the world and whatnot, and a minute after he left, God brought another lady to us, asking for a few pesos. We gave her some money, and then asked if we could pray for her, and she said yes, so we did.

The next thing on our list was to present a sketch, so me + Manuel stood up on a bench in a corner of the central, and gave a shorter presentation of a video we’d seen in Evangelism class. It essentially is where you are holding a journal, talking about all the good and bad in your life, how everything you’ve done is written in this journal, how one day we are going to be judged for what’s in our journal, and what’s in your journal?, and how when we receive Christ he erases all the bad, it doesn’t matter to Him, and He gives us a journal with clean white pages. Manuel led and I translated (because there’s a lot of tourists downtown), and afterward we talked to a lady who’d been listening and had received Christ, and a young girl came up and told us she wanted to evangelize through dramas and we shared with her what we’d been studying.

After this, we had pretty much run out of time, so we headed back to catch another combi (the mini bus), and spoke one more time on that. Ricardo left then, just as mysteriously as he’d arrived, and we were sitting next to a mother and I made her baby smile :) aww. When we got back, we shared stories between us all, and it was neat to see how God had moved that day, brought us people out of nowhere, that we weren’t even looking for, to minister to.