Hey Sisters and Brothers in Christ,

I hope your day was blessed. I had a good day on campus and Gordon prayed with me to receive Jesus. He was sitting in the PE lounge upstairs writing stuff down on notebook paper kind of in the middle of something on his phone. He  knew a Christian football player, Kevin,  who’d come to our Bible Study last year and is now playing in Reno, Nevada.  Gordon was about 6’4″ and maybe 275 lbs. African American. He had his hair in 6 inch braids all over his head, had some facial beard and mustache and wore Black Ray Ban style plastic frame glasses. He had black cotton sweats on and a black hoodie. He cast a giant shadow. When I asked him what he would say to God to get into Heaven he said, “I’ve done everything right, tried to be a good person. I’ve been through a lot of adversity—been through hell and back. I’m a good person.” “So you basically think you go to Heaven because you are a good person?” “Yeah, right,” he said. His father was a deacon he told me and his mom active in the Church. He had committed to God on some level when he was 7 (I think he said) and he remembered the great feeling he had afterward, so he was confident in that. He said he thought he had about a 90% chance of going to Heaven. I pointed out he could have an emotional good feeling from doing something he thought his parents wanted him to do as a kid or he thought was right, since I knew already he did not understand the Gospel. Then I began explaining the Gospel to him as he became half distracted by his phone project which turned out to be admission related to schools he was interested in getting into. I but I kept going thru Gospel with him, fighting his distraction on his phone the entire time, until the end. I simply paused regularly and said, “Ya feel me?” or “Ya get that.” Or asking some kind of direct question so he would have to stop writing an email on his phone and engage with me. But I made him think about it and he realized as we went through that he had not been trusting in the sacrifice of Christ as I pointed it out. “You don’t go to Heaven because you are good, but because Jesus is good and He died for you.” I asked him if he wanted to be forgiven for his sins and he did, so I explained he could ask for forgiveness, trusting in Jesus. I talked him through the prayer asking if it was the desire of his heart. He had to stop and read it and said it was, so I said he could pray it right now and know he was forgiven for his sins and was going to Heaven. “You wanna do it?” He looked at me and nodded realizing, I think, I had been offering him something he thought he already had. He took the booklet and prayed to receive Jesus. “Thanks Bob,” he said. He held on to the booklet then but I kind of pried it away so I could explain life in the Spirit. He was really interested in that, now that the Holy Spirit was in him and could get his attention. I explained how God could give him strength to do anything he sought to do, give him self control on the field and help him play better and do good and after he could give God the credit. I told him I would pray for him each night for the next year because he had prayed to receive Jesus. He began telling me his dreams to play D1 football and asked me to pray about that and I said I would. I explained that God might send him to a school God wants for him but he at first does not want. But God could use it to help him excel and do well and we talked about the way God works sometimes. I got up to head out and said God Bless and he said, “Alright, you be safe.” I suppose an old man he outweighed by over 150 pounds looks a bit on the fragile side. I smiled and said I’d do that and headed out.

So thanks for your prayers for the ministry and for evangelism today if you had a chance. God blessed.

In Him,

Bob