West Port Experiment

Yesterday I finished the last round through my parishes for the season. As the air gets chillier, my hands and ears get colder, so doorstep conversations turn less pleasant for all involved. For the winter, I turn to revisit folks who will likely have me in, reach out to other contacts outside the district, and resume and start up one-on-one Bible studies.

A few highlights from the last couple of outings. In my Warwick parish, I returned to a house where last year where I had a very interesting, long talk.  But it wasn’t ‘John.’ Instead, ‘Jake’ answered the door with his 10 year old daughter, ‘Emily.’ I asked about John and found out that he had moved and was renting the place out to them. But clearly they were friends and had been cut out of the same cultural cloth. Jake was a skeptic, a self-styled pagan. Since I had recently finished a book that addressed the case for the resurrection, I made a brief case for it as well as the reliability of the NT. What a privilege it is to communicate the witness of those who witnessed glory. “We have not followed cunningly devised fables.” Emily was pretty precocious. Clearly, she had been religiously catechized. A rather outspoken atheist, Emily was a believer in ‘science.’ Heartbreaking. O Jesus, make them as Saul of Tarsus. Arrest them by your grace!

Yesterday, my theme was gratitude and the evil of ingratitude. At a few doorsteps I retold the story of Jesus’ healing of the ten lepers and the heartbreaking disease of ingratitude showing itself in the 90%. One young fellow, a Syrian Muslim by birth, but rather irreligious overall, listened with some interest.

Another Muslim – Somali, I think – said that he was rather devout. He attends the mosque regularly. But he listened politely. I asked him whether he was familiar with the story of Yousef (Joseph). I told the story about the envy and hatred of his ten brothers, his betrayal of Joseph, leaving him for dead, and Joseph’s rise to power to become their savior. This, I pointed out, was a pattern of the Messiah who was to come. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” Pray for these two very different Muslim young men. We’ll call them ‘Malak’ and ‘Raafid.’

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