The Summer We Nouned a Verb

Our Summer mission team, 2001

     "God," I prayed, looking up at my dorm room ceiling, "thank You for getting us this far.  Thank you for all the work You did through us in St. Louis these past two weeks.  Get Kristie and me safely to Boston tomorrow...and Lord, give us someone to witness to on the plane tomorrow.  Amen."

    I was nineteen.  It was 2001, my fifth and final summer being a summer missionary before I went full into the ministry.  I was excited.  Several of us had just received training, and tomorrow, my teammate Kirstie and I would fly to our summer destination of Boston, Massachusetts (technically, we flew into Providence, Rhode Island and were driven to Boston).  I prayed in earnest faith that God would bring us someone that needed the gospel on the plane...but my faith about it wasn't that strong.  This was proven the next day, when I packed my Bible in the overhead compartment, where I couldn't reach it!

     I shouldn't have been surprised when a woman in her late 20's plopped down next to me (Kirstie had the window seat, I was in the middle, and this woman had the aisle).

     "Hi, I'm Belinda," she introduced herself as the plane started.  We made small talk for a few minutes, before Belinda asked us, "So, this is going to sound really stupid, but what religion are you and can you tell me about it?"

     I suddenly realized God had answered my prayer from the night before, and I was convicted of my lack of faith when I discovered that my Bible was inaccessible.

     Fortunately, Kirstie had Biblical tracts in her purse (more about that in a minute), and we were able to use it to explain the gospel.

     "Thank you," Belinda told us sincerely as the plane touched ground in Providence.  "You've really given me something to think about."

     So our ministry in Boston really began before we even arrived!  Wow!  What was the rest of out summer going to be like?  God was clearly at work!

     I could write a book about all the amazing experiences we had in Boston.  We saw so many answered prayers for people to be saved (and I never forgot my Bible again!).  We taught 5-day Bible clubs in urban and suburban settings. 

     I recall one of our small, middle class suburban clubs.  Only a few children showed up all week.  What was interesting was that the neighborhood moms showed up with their kids.  One was the mother of a four-year-old boy.  The kid was horrible, and the mother didn't seem to do anything about it.  She told us she let her son come to the Bible Club because the Bible was "great literature" and she wanted her son exposed to it.  She didn't see it as more than that.  But she took a great interest in Kirstie's Bible.  It was a study Bible with Greek and Hebrew in it.  This woman shared she was of Greek decent, and just seemed fascinated in the Greek portion of Kirstie's Bible.  One day, as I taught the missionary story, Kirstie quietly shared Christ with this mother.  We found out later that fall that this woman gave her heart to the Lord!

     My favorite club that summer was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just blocks from Harvard University.  We were told it was the most unchristian community in the United States.  The neighborhood was full of kids, all riding their bicycles around, but only four showed up all week (less than 1% of the kids in that neighborhood).  In fact, when our missionary leader Tom tried to encourage more kids to come, one of the mothers called the police (they didn't come down because we weren't breaking the law, but the woman came and yelled at us.). It didn't seem like an environment where God would work...but He did.  One of the students who showed up was a twelve-year-old named Erika.  At first I thought she had an attitude.  But she began asking questions about the Bible, clearly showing she was spirituality hungry for truth, and had been thinking about it prior to the Bible club.  She asked why Jesus had to rise from the dead... wasn't it enough that He died for us?  Could we still have eternal life if He had just died for our sins and gone to Heaven?  I was taken off guard, but God seemed to give me the answers.  I told her Jesus had to rise again to prove victory over sin and death, once and for all.  After club was over that day, Erika and I had a conversation about Christ, and I asked her if she wanted to receive Christ as Lord and Savior.  She said yes, and before I could say a word, she dropped to her knees and began weeping.  "Jesus," she began, "I know I'm a sinner.  I know I don't deserve eternal life!  I deserve to go to hell for my sins.  But You died for me so I could be saved and forgiven.  That's what I want.  I want to be saved from my sins.". By the time she was done, I, too,  was weeping.  The last day of club, she simply said, "Thank you." And that was that.

     Kirstie was very evangelistic with tracts.  She always carried a supply with her. Every day, amidst public transportation, walking, and just daily business between ministry events, Kirstie would hand out tracts to people we met.  She mostly gave out a really good tract called "How to get to Heaven".  I remember the first person in Boston she gave it to.  It was an Irish woman on the subway (the Boston subway is called the "T").  This woman took the tract with interest and read the title aloud, "How to get to Heaven," she said in a delightful brogue.  "That's one of those questions no one knows the answer to, isn't it?". We smiled and told her to read it and find out.

     Kirstie got so involved in giving out tracts that I gave her a nickname.  I began calling her "The Tractor" because she gave out tracts.

     After that, we turned the word tract (a noun) into a verb.  Kirstie would say, "I'm going out tracting." That meant she was going out to give tracts to people.

     I caught the tract vision too, and "tracting" became a big part of our day to day lives there.

     One of our craziest experiences that summer involved tracts.

     We were doing a Bible club at the Salvation Army.  Each day that week, we'd walk from the Salvation Army to our next club a half mile away.  It was a pleasant walk, and we would chitchat as we went along.  But even then, Kirstie would hand tracts out to people.  As I said, she usually handed out "How to get to Heaven."

     This particular day, Kirstie mysteriously had one extra, different tract in her pile.  Neither of us ever knew how it got in there.  It was a tract called "The Visitors", and it was specifically designed for witnessing to Mormons.  Using it for anyone else would have been pointless.

     So Kirstie and I were innocently walking along.  She's handing out her trscts, until, suddenly this different tract is on top, and the next person walking by us is a man (two actually) in white shirts, black pants, and name badges.  Mormon Missionaries!

     It all happened so fast.  Kirstie just naturally handed out the tract. And the white-shirted young man thanked her and kept walking!

     Kirstie stopped short. "I just gave that tract to a Mormon missionary!"

     Both Kirstie and I were from the western United States, and were familiar with Mormons.

     We turned and looked at the two missionaries who had just passed us.  The were walking away, looking down.  They were reading out tract.  Suddenly, they stopped dead in their tracks (pun not intended!).  They spun around and began pursuing us!

      What to do?  If we stood waiting for them, it would look like we had expected a confrontation, maybe even wanted one.  And we surely didn't.  But if we ran away, it would make us look ashamed of our message.  We decided to walk normally on, as if nothing had happened, and let them catch up.

    It didn't take long.

     After a very short introduction, the older of the two demanded if we thought Jesus would go around "dissing Mormons." Kirstie had on a shirt that said "What would Jesus do?" They seized on this.  "You're asking a lot of people that question, but you're not even doing it!" They told her angrily.
     They then told us the Bible AND the Book of Mormon were both the word of God.
   "Why do you need two books?" Kirstie asked.  "Why couldn't God get the message right in one book?"

     This flustered them.  The more experienced one said, "Bible comes from the Latin word biblia." This was not an answer, but a smokescreen.

     Next, I asked them to explain how they could believe Joseph Smith had really had the experience of visitation from the alleged angel Moroni when the Apostle Paul warned in Galatians 1:8 that even if an angel from heaven gave a different gospel, let him be accursed.

     Again, they were at a loss for a good answer.  Stammering, the talkative one said, "Well, the Apostle Paul wasn't really aware of what God was doing at the time. He couldn't take it." Couldn't take it?  It made Paul sound like a mental case!

     The missionaries then tried to prove a point by asking, "What did Jesus say to NicoDERmus in John 3?". It only took seconds for me to realize he meant Nicodemus, and was pronouncing it with an R in it.  But in that second it took, he moved on, and there were more important things to talk about than something as minor as a name pronunciation, so we let that go.  They claimed John chapter 3 was all about joining the Mormon Church.

     They called our literature "crap".  But eventually it grew less tense.  We had a really hard time getting rid of them!

     Finally, after what seemed like an hour of fruitless conversation, they asked if they could leave us with an old hymn.

     By this point, I thought, "Anything to get them to go away!" I was curious what Mormon hymns 

were like, so I shrugged an okay.

     They began singing, "The wise man built hid house upon the rock..." complete with hand motions.  The only sang a few bars of it and then stopped.

    "Is that a hymn?" They asked me imploringly.

    I tried not to laugh.  "It's actually a Sunday school song, but you can sing it if you want."

     After they left us, we got the giggles and laughed about it for days!

     I know God set that up, just as He set up everything else.  Maybe it made more of a difference than we know.  We'll never know until Heaven the full results of our "tracting" and other ministry.  Life has gone on.  Kirstie and I both went to Bible colleges, married Christian husbands, and are running the race marked out for us.  We're not in Boston.  That summer was so long ago.  Can the different happenings from over sixteen years ago still matter?

     Yes!  Those who got saved from that ministry are still in God's hands, fulfilling His plans for them.  God's truth went out, and it will not return void!  Eternity was touched.

     Not only that, but I also believe that nothing for God is ever isolated.  There's a ripple effect.  Only God knows, but maybe one of the new believers that summer went on to lead a dozen others to Christ!  And maybe one of THOSE people led a dozed others...and....you get the idea.  I believe doing evangelism sets a chain of events into effect.  But even for it's own sake, that summer touched eternity.

     Run the race God has set before you!  It'll be exciting in Heaven to see all the ways God used it that you never knew!  Maybe I'll see those Mormon Missionaries in Heaven!  I hope so!