Man. What to say about tonight!?
I stepped out the door around 10pm and noticed not only was it getting chilly already, but that it had clearly been raining. I hoped and prayed as I walked to the Vox that this wouldn’t matter, but that the weather would not hinder the possibility of running into young people again this Friday night.
I met up with Siewalt at The Vox (for those who don’t already know, Leeuwarden’s Youth For Christ chapter), and then hit the streets. I don’t know what happened, but we just were not getting anything accomplished. We agreed we were both way better at one on one evangelism than open air preaching and approaching big crowds of people, yet there was nobody around except like these 20 teenagers at the Vacht (a cafe type of building right by the canal).
So Siewalt (if you’re reading this, hey man!) and I walked around a good square area two or three times, all the while praying and asking the Lord to put someone in our path that we could talk to because neither one of us wanted to go home tonight empty handed. And wouldn’t you know it, at that moment it suddenly started to rain. Did I say rain? I meant POUR. Like everybody we could see was now running for the closest shelters, and we ran to I believe a shoe store, and agreed we’d wait 5 more minutes before determining if we’d call it quits–hoping the rain would stop immediately. Just then three young men also ran to the shelter we were under, and started a conversation with us. Then Pastor Mark showed up as well, but any hope to get a conversation going was torn a part when some passerby came along when he heard the name of Jesus being mentioned, and started telling us that he was Jesus but like Allah or something retarded like that. It was a distraction from the pit of hell, and it worked and made these kids scram.
But that’s ok, our efforts were not wasted.
We immediately took Mark over to where the large group of youth were, and Angelique from last week was there, and way more cordial to us than last week. Pray that God will arrest her attention and draw her to Him, because that did not happen tonight–not yet. Nobody I tried small talking with was interested in doing more than just small talking, so I stood next to Mark for a while and prayed under my breath while he witnessed to a girl and about 5 or 6 other guys just stood against the wall and listened. Very little of it made sense to me, but I could tell everyone was listening respectfully–pretty cool since the majority of them were admittedly high (I remind you marijuana is legal in the Netherlands in case that detail seemed culturally insignificant to you).
I did not understand much of what was going on, but one kid was clearly trying to tell Mark that all gods are the same, and that Allah and Jesus are the same. I didn’t understand the rest, but I did understand that they didn’t like it very much when Mark told them that Allah was not God but a demon. That basically ended the conversation for a few, and about that time some scattered.
Just then I saw a young adult aged man about 50 yards away look at us, shout something and then come over. I thought “oh no, not some other ‘I am Jesus‘ distraction’. This guy, clearly inebriated, started to preach to the kids with Mark. I tried to pull him away and talk to him, but it was to no avail. I saw in same spot that he had just come from, a young adult aged woman looking kind of embarassed that he was doing this, so I asked “is this your friend?” and she came over. She spoke flawless English, making me think she was British due to her accent–but alas she was Dutch and lived in Leeuwarden. We got talking and to make a long story short, our focus shifted to him and her, and we prayed for the woman–Lenika (if you’re reading this, hey! sorry if I spelled your name wrong) and she gave her life to Jesus and prayed a prayer after us to have Jesus reveal Himself to her. All the while her boyfriend, the man that came over to help Mark preach, joined in and agreed with everything we were telling her.
Mark jaunted over to his apartment and got two Bibles–both in English, and gave her one, but the man, Allen (if you’re reading this, hey man!) said he already had one, and explained to us that he was a pastor’s son, but was away from God, and asked us to pray for him for his sins to be forgiven because He knew God was after him, and heard us and knew God put us in his path. Man, it was so cool! And so we also prayed for him. It turns out Lenika lives right near The Vox and walks by it every day, so she agreed to pay it a visit on any of the various nights something is going on there. But Thursday in particular is when Mark encouraged her to go since there’s a Bible study about who Jesus is taking place every Thursday there.
We parted ways with this couple, and Allen told us he was going to call his father tomorrow and tell him what had happened. I gave him and her both one of my makeshift business cards and anticipate hearing from both of them in the coming week.
Well, I love being involved in leading people to Jesus.
I’ve heard it said that there’s three things in life that we believers can do/get to do that will give us an idea of what it feels like to have God’s heart, and only the latter two are ones I’m experientially familiar with; 1) Having a child, 2) Leading people to Jesus and 3) Laying hands on a sick person and seeing them healed. What do all three of these things have specifically in common? They all involve us partnering with God to impart life to someone else. And man, there’s no greater excitement in this world than praying with someone to get saved!
Some of you have told me how excited you are to read these entries. Well, how would you like to be the one writing them? There’s sick and dying people everywhere. If the Church would really make time to do friendship evangelism and not just ‘crusade/event evangelism’ we could really rock the kingdom of darkness in our cities. Tonight, one prodigal son was brought home and the kingdom of hell was just plundered by at least one soul that we know of. Isn’t that exciting?!
And to think, I almost went home because of the rain…
