A New Look at Evangelism

Today we went to a park area downtown to do a little evangelizing. You see, when most people hear the word ‘evangelism’ they cringe. Often times, Christians don’t want to evangelize because, for some reason, it has a negative connotation. We imagine someone standing on the street corner boisterously waving a Bible around yelling about God. It’s actually quite different. Evangelism can be described as: one hungry man showing another hungry man where to get food. The goal is not for you to save the person but to bring them closer to God and allow the Holy Spirit to save them….in God’s timing. So today we went at it from a different direction. We looked a bit crazy but it was so much fun and really seemed very affective. We did a flash mob, which is when one person begins doing something and, slowly, everyone else joins in. Dash started out by stretching and running in place and then two more people joined him. It looked as though he was exercising alone and then two strangers decided to join in. Then the music started and more people joined in. Before you knew it there were about 15 of us exercising in the middle of this sitting area. People looked so confused, not quite sure what to think. After the exercises finished I gave a short message on Jeremiah 32:27 and the strength of God and how He is able to help us when we feel like we are too weak to go on. Immediately after I spoke we did a short drama depicting the power of Jesus in our lives, followed by a short testimony by Katie. After all of that, we stuck around and talked with people. Some approached us and others were approached by us. We had the opportunity to pray with so many people and I think it blessed us as much as it blessed them. We also asked some people who God is to them and had them write their answer on their hands then we took pictures. After all of that we pulled out the sidewalk chalk and spent some time drawing and writing on the ground, some of the locals joining in. I feel like God was absolutely there backing us up and I am sure lives were impacted. There’s no way some of those people walked away from that and forgot about what they experienced, praise God! Today was a day of new experiences for me…my first time speaking in that type of setting AND my first time having a conversation in Spanish with a stranger. I even translated a little. My Spanish definitely still needs a lot of work but I have to say I think it was pretty successful today.

Please pray for us as we prepare to leave for Nicaragua this Thursday. Our schedule has changed a bit and we will be in Nicaragua for a week and then come back to Costa Rica for the remainder of our lecture phase. In October we will go camping in the jungle for a week then head down to Bocas del Toro, Panama for a short time. After that, we will spend some time doing outreach in Costa Rica then make our way up to Honduras for the remainder of our outreach. Thank you SOOO much to all of you who have supported us (and me) financially and for all of the prayers I may never know about. Check back in about a week for the outcome of our time in Nicaragua!