A recap

This blog is an afterthought, an inspiration that came after two very successful outings of Gospel preaching. Rather than creating two blog posts for each of those times, writing as if they had just happened, I thought it would be best to just give a recap of those trips.

Currently we are making the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Rail our place of work, and typically late at night, from 9 PM until about 1 or 2 AM. This was decided upon after my fellow workers and I came to the conclusion that this place and time would have the highest concentration of “real sinners” that we knew of in the Richardson area, which is where we typically meet for prayer. Do not take offense at my reference to sinners, obviously we are all sinners, but it is obvious I am referring to people who are living in serious sin, living licentious lives. And let me tell you, we were spot on.

The first night we went out was about two months ago, it was a Saturday night. It was me, Tom, and Brandon. I had been envisioning this event for quite some time, I just constantly felt myself being drawn to this work, especially in prayer, and I had never done it in my entire life and felt terrified but also excited. I felt like some sort of pioneer walking into a completely uncharted land. Both Tom and Brandon had previous experience doing this, but not as Catholics (all 3 of us are converts to the Church), so they were wondering how they were going to adapt to the new message they were presenting to people.

We drove in one car to the train station, got out of the car, and prayed together for a short time, asking the Lord to speak through us and to convict hearts and open eyes. We walked to the automated ticket machine, bought our tickets, and realized we had quite a bit of time until the next train, so we started looking around the station for people to talk to. When we saw a woman coming towards us we all started getting a little nervous. You imagine what you will say to open things but it’s actually just working up the nerve to walk over and open your mouth for the first time that is hard. We have some tracts (aka pamphlets) that we created for our apostolate to lead people to the Catholic Church, and we brought them with us. It was decided that approaching women as a group would not be wise or charitable since it would put any woman immediately on the defensive, or the run. Tom went over to her and tried to talk with her without much success.

When the train finally came, we were glad to get on. See, the great thing about evangelizing on a train is that people cannot get away from you until their stop comes, they have no excuse and nowhere to be. You have a captive audience unless they become irate or just get up and walk to another seat. Once on the train, we split up and looked for people to talk to, praying to be led to whoever God wanted us to speak with. Usually we would try to find someone who wasn’t near a lot of other people so they felt comfortable talking about such a deep subject as salvation. All in all we spoke to maybe 5 or 6 different groups of people, but since the details of each one is not fresh in my mind, I’ll just skip to the highlight of the night.

We had gotten off the train at one point in the night and walked around a shopping area near the station. Without finding anyone to talk to, we came back to the station and found two women sitting on a bench, speaking and cursing very loudly at one another. They had been drinking but were still mostly coherent. We approached them and after a short introduction they became aware of our purpose for talking with them. Immediately they became defensive and very angry with us, for different reasons. One woman harbored a lot of anger towards God and especially towards the incredibly strange, media induced notion of the Catholic Church which she subscribed to. The other was angry because she was a boldly self-proclaimed lesbian and knew that as Catholics we believe that marriage can be between a man and a woman only and that it is the only proper arrangement for sexual relations. The laughter, insults, anger, and disbelief that was shown to us I expected, but what was very interesting was their desire to be condemned. Over and over they would repeatedly say “And I know you all think I’m going to hell.” Each time we protested that we do not have the right or ability to judge them, they would try to find a new way in which to get us to condemn them.

With the self proclaimed lesbian, Tom discussed the natural law and the teaching of the Church on sex, and with the other Brandon and I tried to not only teach her about Christ, but draw out her reasons for being angry with God and confront them. Something interesting that I noticed was that once you confront someone’s major reasons for unbelief, if they are not open to what you are saying, they may try to retreat into petty issues. For example, this particular woman after a deep conversation on suffering said “Well, all I can say is that the Sabbath is supposed to be Saturday and you Christians made it Sunday so that’s enough for me not to believe right there.”

By the end of the conversation, when they had reached their stop, we had made serious progress and as they hugged, yes that’s right, hugged us goodbye, one of the women agreed to go to a Catholic Church and pray, asking for God to show Himself in her life. That’s a win in my book.

We left the DART at about 2 AM, tired but completely on fire for God and His Word.

I think I’m going to make a second post for the other outing.