Sunday - July 20

Monday July 21st - First day hitting the streets. Our day started with some awesome worship and some great preaching from a pastor from South Carolina. It was good, trust me, but memory fails me as to what he talked about. After that, we hit the Subway. Our chord leader stood up on the subway, announced who he was and presented the gospel to those on the subway!!! Crazy I thought. We handed out some gospel tracks and got off at our stop - Central Park. Lisa and I were paired up together and headed off into the park to do surveys. After a long while praying and a long while trying to figure out what the heck we were doing, we decided to start asking people if they would like to take a survey. After many rejections, a man named Chad agreed to take our survey, however his family was waiting for him so he politely answered the questions and we let him go. Quite a few more rejections, and Lisa approached a sweet old lady eating an ice cream cone. She was wonderful to talk to. She was Jewish, but told us a story of how her mother was hiding from the Nazi's in a Christian's house in Germany. The owner of the house gave her mother a cross and told her that Jesus would always protect her. One day the owner of the house was out, the Nazi's stormed in and this ladies mother held up the cross and the Nazi's did not see her. Her and her family had a great fondness for Jesus because of that story, but not a saving faith in Him. Lisa did a great job of presenting the Gospel and asking her if she would be willing to place her faith in him. She wasn't ready to, but we had a wonderful talk and found out here husband who was blind had just completed an olympic triathlon. We than ran across a man who quoted tons of scripture with the answers to our survey questions. It was a relief to run across a fellow believer. However, he did not believe in churches because they had failed him so many times. We talked with him for about an hour and he encouraged us and I would like to believe we encouraged him. Then after about 9 million rejections, a wonderful lady name Katarina from Czechoslovakia agreed to take our survey. We had a wonderful conversation with her. She did not believe in God. Her husband had committed suicide some time ago and with all the strife, depression, and greed in this world there was no way there could be a God. We pleaded with her that all of that strife is a result of sin and that one day God would restore us to Him and all these terrible things would go away, but she graciously declined to agree. After 4 hours, we headed back to the hotel. We met up with our friends Nate and Tara and Nate's parents and went to Little Italy for dinner. We tried to catch the Statten Island Ferry, but we missed it. Oh yeah, forgot ot mention that I had a terrible sinus infection/cold as well. Amazingly, I felt sick in the morning and at night, but when we were witnessing...I felt fine. Being totally exhausted, we crashed for the night.