Hey Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

I hope you have been having a nice weekend and things are going well in your walk with the Lord.  Things went well on campus Friday, in as much as Eddie prayed with me to receive Jesus. But he was the only guy I could get to go through the Gospel with me the entire day.  I had some conversations with other students I knew, chatting them up. But at the end of the day I’d wished I’d counted how many peeps had turned me down. Not particularly a record for that on Friday, Fridays are notoriously empty of the student population at school so a lot of halls you turn to look down are completely empty.

I finally ended up (at close to 12:30 or so) in the PE building. Eddie was one of only 3 people in there. He was sitting alone at some tables they have lined up this year.  When I first saw him, he was talking to one of the Christian guys on the football team, a huge black dude who plays on the line who’d I’d gone through the Gospel with earlier in the year. I walked around the staircase to come from the other side and the other guy at the table turned me down. But then Eddie, about 4 seats away in the line of tables, said he was interested. He had short brown hair, longer on top and swept to the side, wore glasses and possessed the most high pitched voice I have heard come out of a college age guy in my life. It rarely broke into lower cadence. He sounded somewhat like the fictional character Screech in the old TV show “Saved by the Bell”. But Eddie was really friendly and did not have the social awkwardness Screech had on the TV show. He was taller than me by a couple inches, skinny, wearing jeans and a Bulls shirt, saying he wasn’t really much of a fan, “just liked the shirt”. He worked at his family’s 7/11. It turned out we had some mutual friends that went to our Bible study and he went to CRU (the name Campus Crusade now has on campus). I started the Crusade group there in 2002 and ran it until 2009. I asked Eddie what he would say to God if he died and God asked him why He should let him into Heaven. At first he wanted to skip the question but finally landed on “I care about people more than myself.” He thought he had about a 90% chance of going to Heaven but did not go to church, “I listen to KLove,” he said. “Klove is church for me.” (Klove is the radio station that plays exclusively Christian music. I rarely listen to it but the DJ’s seem very friendly and pointed out to him later this was because they were in the Spirit.) He listened to the Gospel closely and with interest, but I wasn’t sure if it was clicking based a bit on his facial expressions.  So after I said, “God wants to live inside you with His Holy Spirit but first He has to make you His type, like a blood transfusion.” I asked if he followed that. “Not really you’re talking really fast.” I might have been. I’m usually conscious of time constraints, kids sometimes have only a bit of time before class. So with Eddie I explained the idea a couple different ways and slowed way down, realizing the ideas were completely new to him. In the end he wanted to be forgiven but was unsure about Jesus being God (When I asked if he believed Jesus was God and had died for his sins and rose from the dead.) I explained that he [Eddie] was kind of like a trinity. He had a mind that was like the Father, a body that was like Jesus and emotions like the Holy Spirit (we are certainly compound beings [1Thessalonians 5:23] based on scripture and I am not saying this is how we should be divided in a biblical sense. I just use this as an illustration to help kids sometimes). “Like when you are by yourself in the car and you talk to yourself. It’s like there is another you inside you. God is like that, three persons in one God. Jesus comes forth from the Father.” I said it was more complicated than that, but asked if that kind of helped him see there were not three gods but one. That seemed to help him and he accepted it. I talked about the Spirit living in him, giving him power to live the Christian life and living “Inside out”. He said he felt God’s presence with him. I told him he could trust in Jesus’ work on the cross then to be forgiven, by asking for forgiveness. I walked him through the prayer, asking if he wanted to pray and receive forgiveness based upon Jesus. “Yeah,” Eddie said and he happily and slowly prayed then to receive Jesus. He said the Bible was “kind of overwhelming” but he did not have a bible, so I gave him one, writing his name in the front and the date so he could remember when he’d been forgiven. I gave him the book Bible Promises for You and he was interested in that so he would have things to post on Facebook. I also gave him 20 Things God Can’t Do though he almost did not want another book.  I told him maybe once in a while he could read a page and there were more quotes in it for Facebook.  He also took a Bible Study. He thought he might come to the fire pit we are doing at the house next week during exams since a mutual friend Kevin (a football player) was coming. It turned out he was the Equipment Manager for the football team. Kevin had turned him down for lunch so he asked me if I’d like to go to lunch with him. I said sure. So we walked across campus to Chik-fil-a and I bought him lunch. I gave him a card with the website for Compass Church, suggesting he could listen to a sermon once in a while, though he lived too far out in Hinsdale to physically attend.

So thanks for your prayers for the ministry all this school year and for evangelism if you had a chance. 139 students prayed with me to receive Jesus on campus  since fall 2016-2017 spring and 3 more peeps off campus. Several others committed to Christ saying they would pray later. It was a blessed year.  Thanks for blessing it with your prayers. At some time during this school year I passed 1000 students that have prayed with me to receive Jesus since I began campus evangelism. Thanks for all your help to make it possible for us to be used by God together.

In Him,

Bob