Evangelism at Tech

I'm a part of the evangelism team in Cross Campus, the college group at the Sunset church where I'm a member here in Lubbock. Our team has been trying to come up with ideas about how to serve and evangelize on Texas Tech's campus here in town. It's not the easiest to come up with stuff. My buddy and I have started a thursday night bible study that was supposed to kick off last week. Last Thursday didn't exactly go as planned, and all the people supposed to come tonight bailed last second. So we started wandering campus this evening and asking people if they'd like to join us for next week. We probably asked 15 people and the immediate answer was "no" with almost no hesitation. It made me think of selling cars, walking out on the lot and having nearly everyone tell me "We're just looking",when the truth was that the majority was there to buy a car. I don't mean to compare evangelism with car sales in the sense that Christians are selling something because that's not the truth. In a physical sense, I have nothing to gain from telling people of my faith. The truth is simply that if you believe in the real Jesus Christ and what he taught, it would be unthinkable not to tell people of his salvation.
Finally, after getting shut down by several people, a few kids said they'd be up for a bible study. The whole thing brings up a lot of thoughts for me though. Obviously the perceptions vary greatly across a college campus, but it's almost as if the overall vibe is that religion is a thing of the past and Christianity is a self-righteous cult that isn't to be trusted. This is a view I'd very much like to help in changing, but it takes much more than the ability to effectively debate. People need to see the actual love of Christ and believe in its source. That's why I'm almost hesitant to call what we're doing a "bible study". In student's minds that's a huge turnoff, when in reality most people would probably be willing to discuss their religious background and compare viewpoints of theology or lack there of. They say that a lack of education is the greatest reason for poverty, and I believe the same holds true for spiritual poverty. I look at people holding cardboard signs on street corners and I have pity for the different hardships they've experienced that I couldn't begin to comprehend; then I think of spiritual poverty as I walk around in every day life, simply knowing that most people are without an intimate relationship with their Creator. As a Christian, my heart breaks for both. Unfortunately, yelling "Jesus is Lord" across a college campus isn't much more productive than telling a homeless person to get a job. If you care about either, there must be a desire to show the spiritually deprived that Jesus is Lord and the physically deprived that there's alternatives to life on the street.
I'm learning. I don't know where everyone is in their faith, or whether they have a faith; but i want to know, and I want to care. The more I pick up this thick book that's seen multiple millenniums, the more I come to believe the adjective that precedes the word "Bible" in its title. It is holy, and the more I read it, the more I want to be. Christians are called to be set apart, and the majority will never understand. They don't have to; they just need to know we care about them. God has put eternity on man's heart. It's man's duty to seek the answer as to why he has placed it there and a Christians privilege to help reveal the mystery.

What is life?

I was having a rough night a few days ago, and I thought to myself, "life is hard". Then I got to thinking a little more about that, and concluded that it isn't life that's hard; it's death that's hard. Someone might say that there's this time period between birth and death that most people call "life" and that is in fact difficult. Let me put a different lens on that though. I believe the truth is that life is beautiful and a tremendous blessing, and that death encompasses pretty much all the worst of what we know. You see it's death that's hard; not just when someone passes away, but the death that sneaks into life as subtly as the bad guy in a horror film. 

I think back to the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were told that they could live in complete freedom, allowing them to do just about anything, but were instructed not to eat of the "tree of knowledge" in the middle of the garden. God said if they ate from that tree they would surely die. Picture this. For however many years Adam and Eve were in the garden, walking with God, they were experiencing life. Then they opted to test the meaning of the phrase "you will surely die" by eating the fruit of the tree they were commanded not to. But they didn't die right away, at least not the death that someone in the 21st century would expect. Not too long after they were banished from the garden, chaos broke loose in certain areas of their life, and I can just picture Eve looking at Adam, with thought of the peace in the former garden they lived in, and saying, "Death is hard". You see, Adam and Eve experienced the true form of both life and death. They experienced life before there was death, and they experienced life after there was death, most likely concluding life was better on its own.

I say all this to express the importance of perspective. I cannot say "life is hard" without immediately thinking of the Giver of life, without thinking of the blessings that come with life. Life isn't hard. Life is perfect; it just happens to be flooded with traces of death. Distinguishing what promotes life or death is more  than eating an apple a day or not smoking cigarettes. It requires a knowledge of truth, a knowledge of what will light the way. Most people would say that death is inevitable. Then again, most people don't know the Giver of life. For many, the biblical record of Adam and Eve is simply a story. For me it's a historical picture of life without death. Heaven is a promise of life without death, of light without darkness, and of truth without lies. Heaven isn't only something to strive for. It shines light on what's living and what's dying right now.

This whole thought came while  I was frustrated with circumstances, while sitting in a Sonic pretending I had the self-control not to order Sonic's version of Dairyqueen's Reese's blizzard. I point this out to bring thought back to the reality of now and let you know that I don't believe life is a vague philosophy that will one day prove itself true. Life is truth. The key is a matter of distinguishing what parts of death have sunk in to what we know as life and ridding our minds of thoughts of death. When I was sitting there thinking "life is hard", my mind was overwhelmed with thoughts of death, thoughts of the difficulty of physical pain, thoughts of the hardship of loneliness, of the hopelessness of a lost world. That's when it occurred to me that that's not life. Life is the everything good, and after all, we are living.

Youtube channel

My friend, Bryant, and I are going to start a Christian youtube channel tomorrow. We're gonna start tomorrow's video off by introducing Bryant and I, our backgrounds and faith. Bryant has a great story, and is a huge inspiration. We're hoping to get topics and questions from viewers and friends on Facebook. Nick Webber suggested we speak about the importance of media and its consequences in the life of a Christian. I don't know if we'll get to that tomorrow, but we're hoping to pick out of the topics that people suggest. We're trying to reach a wide range of people and hope to give good insight from a godly perspective. We encourage comments and suggestions for how to improve. We certainly want to be an encouragement to both believers and nonbelievers.

Another aspect of our youtube channel will be clips of poetry. I've written lots of poems that I'd like to share that address aspects of Christianity in today's society. I look forward to hearing comments and suggestions from friends on Facebook.

Break Week

Our first quarter here at Sunset is finished and we are on a break week between terms. The first term finished well. I think I passed all my classes, and I've been able to get involved with some good groups outside of school.

There's a program called "China Now" that came to one of our chapel services last week. They are looking for Christians who are fluent and educated in the English language to go to Chinese Universities to teach 14-20 hours a week. Housing and salary is taken care of, so the rest of the 148+ hours of the week can be spent serving and evangelizing. If I wasn't in school, I think I'd already be in China. God keeps teaching me to be patient and letting me know there's endless options for mission work when I finish up school next spring.

I was able to visit a place called "Tent City" over the weekend with some friends from church. It's a little plot of land on the outskirts of Lubbock where there's about 100 military tents set up for homeless people to live. We were encouraged to just go out and make conversation, meet people, and hear some stories, to share time with the people there. I'm so grateful for places like this. They find people in need and help them get back on their feet. There's a "no drug" policy, which I'm sure isn't easy to maintain, but the place seems to be very respectable. I sat down and talked with a few different people, trying to be mostly in one-on-one conversation. I ended up meeting about four different people, each of them having a unique story. The first man I talked to was telling me his family didn't associate with him and he really didn't have any active relationships. When I asked him if he had a relationship with God, he said that really wasn't his thing. Later on in the conversation, he said it's scary not to know Jesus. Questioning whether I heard him right, he again said, "It's scary to be apart from Jesus." I got the feeling this man wanted a relationship with God but didn't understand God's forgiveness. This man doesn't need to hear about forgiveness; he needs to be shown it. Life is all about relationships and if evangelism lacks the relational aspect, then it's not fulfilling its purpose. My personal goal is to be diligent about showing love to people consistently as I tell them about God's love, otherwise they won't trust what I claim is "God's love".

There was a young guy there from Jamaica, who had come up to Midland on a basketball scholarship for the junior college. He's probably my age and he's homeless in a tent. People become homeless a number of different ways. While a vast majority has no compassion on homeless because of drug and alcohol use, I'd say homelessness is a result of three things: a lack of education, a lack of love being shown, and a lack of relationships. Drugs and alcohol are merely used to fill the void. 

Something I think people don't realize is that there's a new generation of homeless people rising up right now, most of whom are underprivileged children in rough homes. If you find yourself lacking compassion for the older generation of homeless people, just take a look at the places where they came from: abuse (both sexual and physical), lacking one or both parents, poverty, having parents who were addicts, and on and on. If Jesus spent his Friday nights with the outcasts, why would I be satisfied with the movies?