Hey Sisters and Brothers in Christ,
I hope your day was truly blessed and I pray that it was as I write this. The last person I talked to today came to Christ.  Ledonte was leaning against the wall using his backpack as a prop on the ground floor of the SRC building. He did a survey with me. He basically did not think he was a bad person and hoped in that for Heaven, but I think the gospel sounded familiar to him. He went to church in Glen Ellyn. He had not asked God to forgive him of his sins based on Christ’s work on the Cross. As I was finishing going through the Gospel with him he had to head for the bus, so we walked together and he prayed to receive Christ reading as he walked. I gave him a Bible Study and he said he’d like a Christian book to read so I gave him More than a Carpenter.

It was kind of a hard day somehow, in part from a long conversation with two atheists. Stefan and Kyle were friends, the later was in a wheelchair with almost no use of his hands. They had been taught a number of lies and were emphatic about them. Stefan said he had read through the Bible twice and had made notes underlining all the contradictions. I said, “I would love to see it.”   I confess I doubted his word a bit, though you can create some issues with crossing genre’s of literature or failing to understand how to interpret a passage. I kind of doubt he did this, and he is the first student I have ever met who read through the Bible twice. (There are resolutions for all the ones I have heard and I have come up with some myself that the apologetic books I have are stumped by.) They also emphatically claimed Socrates was killed because he was an atheist, claiming they had been taught this in a philosophy class at COD and on two other occasions by teachers in High School. I don’t remember ever hearing this before and the Dialogues do not suggest a religious aspect to the trial. I explained Socrates words are completely found in Plato’s dialogues who was not an atheist, and Socrates was not killed but committed suicide by drinking Hemlock after refusing exile. They seemed to kind of remember this.  It was a long conversation and wore me out for some reason. Stefan also claimed there was absolutely no evidence for the existence of God. But they each took a book, The Case for Faith and The Case for a Creator, promising to read them.  But Stefan insisted no one ever stopped being an atheist and Lee Strobel was obviously lying if he said he had been. So basically everyone is lying if they said anything that contradicted anything he thought.  But I smiled all the way through and simply countered their remarks, pointing out that since they admitted there was at yet no proof disproving God or explaining the origin of the world as we find it, God had to be a solid a possibility as their position which they had to admit was also faith based. So hey.

I went through the gospel with 2 Muslim girls on two separate occasions as well and several others, man it really just seemed to wear me out somehow today, maybe it is just the end of the week.

Thanks for your prayers today I need them, and I hope you will have a chance to pray for Ledonte and that Kyle and Stefan would read the books.

In Him,
Bob Bollow