Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Fishing With Trish...

Sweet Frog is the name of a local frozen yogurt shop that I used to visit weekly along with two of my friends, Amy and Kristen. We met to do bible study, hand out tracts and of course eat yogurt. It’s something I really looked forward to since it incorporates two of my favorite things: fellowship and food.

We had been meeting and eating their delicious frozen yogurt for months, when one week Amy noticed something on their yogurt cups that we had somehow missed all this time, but was printed clear as day: “John 3:16”. We about fell out of our chairs. How did we not see that? About that time, the manager, Ed, walked by and we told him what we had just discovered. He laughed and said that the “Frog” in “Sweet Frog” was an acronym for “Fully Rely On God”. We about fell out of our chairs again, but this time it was because an evangelism door had just swung wide open. Although we had faithfully given Ed all of our different gospel tracts, for some reason we had never fully shared the gospel with him one-to-one. Kristen got the conversation going by asking, “What church do you go to?”

He kind of winced and said, “Well, I haven’t been in a long time, but I usually go to the Catholic church. My wife is Jewish.”

“Wow, big difference”, she said. “Let me ask you this, what’s one thing that you know for certain is going to happen to you? Something that you have full assurance about.”

He thought for a minute and said, “Well, death.”

“That’s right! You’re part of the ultimate statistic, 10 out of 10 people die. So, what assurance to you have for where you will go when you die?”

“Well I hope I will go to Heaven, but I don’t know”, he answered.

Kristen gave me “the look” that told me that it was okay to jump in. I’ve been known to take over her witnessing encounters, so now I know to wait for “the look”.

I said, “Just look at yourself in light of the Ten Commandments. Have you ever lied or stolen anything?”

He said he had.

“Thank you for being an honest liar" I joked.

He laughed and then I continued, “So, if you were to die tonight and stand before God, would you be innocent or guilty of breaking His law?”

“Guilty”, he replied”

“Where does God send guilty people?”

“Hell. But I can’t keep talking because my boss is on his way and I need to make sure the store is ready”, he kindly said and off he went.

Sure enough about five minutes later his boss came in and they went into his office at the back of the store.

We all sat there feeling terrible. Ed had just received some really bad news about where he was going when he died, but he hadn’t heard the good news of the Gospel. We were so burdened, hoping that his boss would hurry up and leave so that we could finish our conversation, but that’s not what happened. Each of us had places to be and had to leave.

Later that night Kristen texted me:


 




To be continued tomorrow :-)...




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