Friday Evening

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As we do every Friday, tonight we went out on the town to evangelize. I went with one of the girls from my team who is Norwegian. I have found the easiest people to talk to are those who are sitting, then those who are standing, and the ones walking are just about impossible. When we first started walking on the main street in Oslo we saw two girls sitting on the steps of a store. I approached them, said hi and could tell right away they were not happy to see me. They were Norwegian so my friend talked to them. I couldn’t understand what they were saying but from the body language I could tell it wasn’t going well. When my friend started to walk away I followed and she explained that when she asked the girl her beliefs she said she did not want to discuss them with her. We both know that we can’t convince someone to accept Jesus but instead it is the Holy Spirit that moves over a person’s heart so it was not worth trying to argue with this girl. As we walked away (not off to a good start) I started praying for God to bring us someone easy to talk to, which He did. I saw a group of girls with backpacks on so I approached them once again with a hello. They also looked quite suspicious of us but didn’t look annoyed like the first two girls. I found out they were Americans, seniors in college and were traveling together for fun. They all go to a Lutheran school and thought it was cool that I was here in a mission training school. We wished them a happy trip and said goodbye so we could find the person God would lead us to that would be in need of His Word. We decided to change locations and headed for the harbor hoping to find someone sitting alone enjoying the evening.
When we reached the harbor at the same time we saw a woman in her forties sitting by herself. We approached her, I introduced us to her and asked her what she believed about God. She said she believed there was one God and that every religion was correct in a way. I told her that we were Christians and that the difference between “our” God and other religions was that He is not some far off being but came to earth and is a “person” who we can talk with and who cares about us everyday. At first she was not interested then I told her about the other night when we did our dance worship (not about the dance worship but what I was thinking about Jesus being with me and protecting me even while I was in a place He didn’t want me). At that point something crossed her face and she started to open up. She said that she had just been there thinking about that there must be some higher being that was taking care of her. She said she was an alcoholic and had been sober for 3 years and was in AA. She said she knew there was some higher being who had been with her while she was drinking and protecting her. We spoke with her for a while then the said she had to go but when we offered her a New Testament she took it saying she has been feeling like she wanted to start reading it to see what it was about. It was such a great experience seeing how God just opened her up. Her name is Nina if you want to say a prayer for her.

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