9/20/10 Alex about 23
I will always have more to learn about evangelism, and writing these stories everyday helps me to reflect on conversations in order to learn from them. Today Jake (from church) and I went to the IIT campus and met Alex, a first-year graduate student. He welcomed my question about life after death, saying "I've been thinking a lot about that lately". He said he finds himself surrounded by atheistic friends, but just can't believe that everything happened by chance. Yet he doesn''t know what to believe about God, either, like whether God is an impersonal force or has a personality. He was very unsure about all this, so much in fact that he didn't really have much of an opinion one way or another. Yet he was sincerely interested, so I went on to explain about God's law and grace - both equally important parts of the Gospel, as well as I could. After a little while Alex stopped asking questions and just listened, so that this was more like a presentation than a conversation, and I'm not sure he was tracking with me. In the end, he seemed to dismiss it by saying he had heard much of this before. If I had it to do over again - and I will in a conversation with someone else - I will try to spend more time getting to know the person before sharing the Gospel so that I can relate it better to their pre-existing experiences and beliefs.
Gospel conversations from the streets and marketplace....
1 comment:
I was very surprised when Alex replied to Jeff's question about a 'higher power' with "Actually, I've been thinking about that a lot lately." I wonder how many people--outside of the church--actually do think about things like that on a day-to-day basis. We will never be perfect ambassador's for Christ, and we should always critique ourselves and strive to do better, but Jeff, know that the Holy Spirit works with us and in spite of us, too. Thank you for the encouragement to share my faith!
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