NYCity

27 May ’19

NYC day 1 was a really cool experience! One of my bigger takæways from today was watching the faithfulness of my friend Elleni (¿) and seeing her march through her appearent shyness to going about sharing the Gospel with total strangers —a SUPER intimidating thing to attempt to do.

sometime later, we also saw a WILD man twice who approached us and, following a moment of eye contact, hollered “YOU MUST NOT BE FROM HERE…” (which, for context, it was actually blatantly obvious that we weren’t from the area in which my group was sharing our faith. our portion of Jackson Heights was majorly hispanic and indian, with a few middle-eastern families scattered about. and if our ethnic buildup didn’t set us apart from those around us, we surely looked like sore thumbs because of the backpacks we were wearing. all of us. the only backpacks. in the whole town. one group, three people. wispy, long-sleeved clothes. making all the eye contact as possible.) “..WHERE ARE YOU FROM??” to which i replied something along the lines of ‘oh hello there, we’re from NC. where ar—..” and like that, as he had what he wanted, he ran off.

during the NYC portion of the trip, we would spend our mornings being trained for evangelism by an organization called Global Gates, which was anything from practical Gospel-sharing tips to linguistic/cultural greetings or other related information to all sorts of odds and ends. thereafter, we would depart from there to go to lunch. we would lunch at a different place each day but the first day we lunched at a place called Kebob Kings and our group henceforth referred to itself as Kabob Kings and Queens. Following lunch, we would depart in mixed groups and go door-to-door asking whoever answered if they needed prayer, explaining that we were followers of Jesus and trying to care for the community through prayer – or we would come questioning people about their religious backgrounds and ask them to explains the intricacies thereof and then we would be able to explain our own beliefs, successfully sharing the Gospel and learning more about other religions and cultures.

later in the day that you and i started earlier, i saw the wildman again. this time he came to us saying simply “THERE ARE INDIANS ON 74TH STREET” before allowing me to fully ask for his name, he darted off once again. i wasn’t able to see him again before we departed. :):

the door-to-door evangelisms that we were doing were not at physically taxing as i had imagined but they were taxing in other areas, ie in terms of mentality and spirituality. it would have been physically taxing because of the many miles and stairs we would walk each day, only to start again the next day. it was mentally taxing because time after time the door would be shut in your face when you mentioned anything about Jesus or prayer or anything further than your name. it was spiritually taxing because you would get shot down or you would pour your heart out to the folks across the doorway only for them to reject Christ and what He did for them on the cross, to have that door shut and be reminded of how lost the world is, thinking it was your fault in some way, time after time

but that’s not what is true. what is true is that whether or not we saw any fruit in our work is irrelevant because we were following Christ in our actions. if anything, we were planting seeds of Christ in these people’s hearts and moving stones out of their spirits of contempt that they have for Christ or for christians, things of eternal weight, value, and significance.

and, hey, listen, they might not have came to believe in Christ and His work on the cross in that moment, but maybe later. or maybe never but they heard the Gospel. They heard that Jesus Christ, who is both fully God and fully man, came to Earth and lived a perfect, completely-sinless life while surrounded by darkness and died as a sacrifice for our sins/guna/paap – died IN OUR PLACE on the cross, and was raised to life again proving that His sacrifice was sufficient for paying for the sins of the world, DEFEATING BOTH SIN AND DEATH. they came to know these things. anything outside of the spreading of this good news is not up to us and we needed to be in constant reminder thereof. otherwise, we would suffer great spiritual taxing.

so, in brief, NYC was incredibly growing to me.

bläk