God Softens Concrete

The week started with a bang on Monday when Riz, James, and Duffy came over to play mafia (a card game). After the game was over, James and Duffy stuck rolled out, but Riz (the darker guy standing in the picture) stayed around. It wasn’t long before we were moving through the depths of the gospel. God was at work, as Riz knew himself to be a sinner, and unworthy of someone to die in his place. It was mind blowing for him. It ended with him taking a free Bible to read through the gospel of John, with the plan of us meeting up with him and the rest of “Team Duff” for pizza Wednesday night to discuss the gospel.


The next day we went and ate lunch with a guy named Nick, who Nate F. had shared the gospel with last week. He was having trouble believing in the validity of the scriptures and hadn’t thought much about the gospel since the last convo. We left him with some literature to address his issues. Nate meets up with him again thursday for the last time.

Wednesday night rolled around and we met up with Team Duff to eat at Filadelphio’s Pizza. Before we had been sitting there for 5 minutes, Kendall asks Riz if he has been reading John, and he had! The conversation quickly exploded into tons of questions about the gospel and Christianity. We ended up spending about 2.5 hours talking through the gospel with these 6 guys as most of them heard it truly for the first time. “I never thought Christianity was like this. I just thought the bible was a list of rules Christians kept” was one comment I remember. In the van ride back to their college, they asked, “Can we go back to your house and get those free bibles, like Riz got?” So we took them all back to our house and gave them Bibles and set them off to read the gospel of John. A couple days later Duffy told me there were things in John he “had been showing everybody”.
(Glenn in the Red Beanie and Tom in the blue/white/gray jacket)
We ended up spending the weekend with them at our evangelistic retreat, sharing stories of our conversions, and fielding random questions as they came up, but mostly just loving them. Right before bed, Duffy pops up from his sleeping bag and says, “Hey Xanders, how long you been Christian?” While to the right of him, Tom is questioning Nate frantz about 2 Peter and asking me if I go to church every Sunday. It was a wild time.

We will only see them a couple more times before we leave. Our prayer is that these six guys will join the Staff guy Josh Eyre or Nate Xanders (a team member we are leaving for 4 weeks) and study the gospel of John with them, and eventually to repent of their sin and follow Christ. We would ask that this would be your prayer also.
This picture is of our evangelistic Retreat.

- Zach, Nate F. and Kendall