Friday Night Notes

glass half-empty... for sure...

There are nights when it's pretty hard to not get weary and discouraged.  This is one of those nights.  The shear level of evil and folly that surrounded me on this particular night of open-air evangelism... well... it was all pretty astonishing.

For starters, our Bible signs took quite a bit of abuse tonight.  If we turned our backs for one second, someone was kicking one of our signs down, or spitting on them. On one occasion, I shamed a young man for kicking down one of our signs and pouring his soda on it.  I told him that the Lord would remember his disrespect for the Word of God; the young man was visibly shaken by my words, and could hardly hide the guilt from his face as he walked away.

Then there was a charismatic woman (a professing Christian) who spoke with Pastor Tim for several minutes.  The woman was clearly ignorant of even some of the most basic doctrines of the Word of God, but she spoke as if she had a firm grip on the Christian Faith.  She told Pastor Tim that all she knew was JD is pretty good, but JC is even better (JD is for Jack Daniel's, and JC is for Jesus Christ).  Now there's a great profession if I've ever heard one.  Oh dear...

A young lady spoke to me shortly after and affirmed that she knew more about God than I, and for that reason, she refused a Gospel tract.  She said this with a few f-bombs here and there, and she got even more vile when I refused to speak with her.  Too bad all that knowledge hasn't taught her a thing about being a decent human being.

About an hour and a half later, I was on a bus heading back home and was subjected to a pathetic sight.  A couple of young ladies got on the bus, no older than in their early twenties.  A man in his late 50s sat across from them and he decided he was going to strike up a conversation, doing his best to impress them, and doing a terrible job of it.  The women were quite embarrassed, doing their best to ignore the man by staring into their smart phones.  I felt like turning around and calling the man "an old fool", but figured I was in no state-of-mind to be rebuking anyone for anything.

And to top of my lovely evening, as I walked from the bus stop to my house, I turned a corner and right in the middle of the street stood a man, completely naked, urinating.  He had a couple of fully dressed "friends" with him, and one of them yelled: "Hey buddy! You have a light?"  I figured the men were all extraordinarily high on drugs so I just walked.  One of the men however was quite persistent and followed me, repeating his question:

"Hey! You got a light?"
"No," I muttered angrily.

"Yo, can we just talk a minute?" the man begged.

"No, I got nothing to say to you," I replied.

The young man then started to curse and swear at me, and at that point, I was preparing myself for a fight.  I was too annoyed to feel any kind of fear at all, and I think that's what intimidated the young man.  He probably figured that I could give him a run of his money in his drugged/drunk state, so he turned back and went back to his friends.  As I am writing this, I am realizing how close I was to a potentially, very dangerous situation.  There were three or four of them, and only one of me.

I really need to be more aware when I head home late at night.


Rand

If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do? (Psalm 11:3)