Chicago minutes
Hey all!
Wow...what a first week of tour. I am definitely super exhausted and spent but it was definitely all worth it.
The first day on the bus I read the parable of the sower and felt the burden to pray for God's Word to fall on good soil.
Last night I read the first two chapters of "Finding Common Ground," by Tim Downs and was struck with the importance of sowing.
"In our zeal for the harvest," He says, "we have forgotten-we have deliberately devalued-the role of those who sow in our generation. In our enthusiasm we have declared harvesting our exclusive domain, forgetting that we have reaped the benefits of someone else's labor-the labor of sowers-and that we are also responsible to sow, or the next generation of Christians will have nothing to reap."
I must admit I was a bit disappointed I didn't get to share the gospel with one student while on tour, though I had a number of significant conversations and others in BSN also had the same. Part of it was due to personal fears of my own that I still need to get over. But a lot of it was simply the fact that I believe the work God had set out for us to do was mainly sowing for the next generation of Crusade staff and students to reap the benefits of the harvest to come on their campuses.
I would have loved to be able to share the gospel with every student I talked with and have them pray to receive Christ. But as I thought about that more, it was more of a personal ambition of making students my targets and projects to make them convert, rather than being compelled to share with them out of a heart of compassion and love.
To sum up our Chicago tour in one word, it would be sowing.
The Lord brought us to the Chicago metro team to increase Crusade’s visibility on the campuses we were on, build credibility with the student body, to cast vision for how to use Keynote bands in the future, as well as the campus faculty, and to plant seeds that would eventually grow.
We shared the gospel openly and planted seeds. We may never see the fruits of our labor but we trust God with the results.
Benedictine University:
Eric was a student that was pretty much right there with us from the moment we arrived on campus. He was a fellow drummer so we pretty much clicked right away and talked about all sorts of fun drum stuff. Yes, I acquired another admirer of the bass drum cannon. hehehehe
And yes, I have named the bass drum. SHE has been affectionately named...”La-fawn-duh”. No, that is not a typo, it is spelled as it reads. I named her in honor of Napoleon Dynamite and because she's the perfect drum for me-"my soul mate" as Uncle Rico would say. :)
Ahem, anyways, back to Eric. He told me he was taking a class on evolution and also a class on Buddhism and Hinduism. We started to talk about evolution a bit and about the stake that’s been driven between science and religion, one that we both felt was unnecessary.
We started talking a bit about the bible and its credibility as a historical document and he just believed it was fabled and basically couldn’t really believe that all that was written inside could be true. I told him about the fact that there are over 1100 copies of the New Testament and only a handful, if that many, of copies of the writings of Socrates and Plato, yet the latter we don’t question, while the former is always in question.
I cut to the chase and expressed how I felt that the reason why people probably don’t want to believe in its historicity is that it forces people to decide then what they really believe about what’s written, especially what Jesus says about himself. And people don’t like that.
We talked about Darwin and I asked him about absolute truth, to which he didn’t have an opinion of either way. When I asked him what he believed personally, he said he had yet to come to a decision and felt he was only 23 and still too young to decide. I just kind of nodded and encouraged him to make a decision soon.
I wish I said that he didn’t know when he was going to die and that this was the most important decision he could make but I guess I didn’t want to force the issue. After our concert, before he left, I did encourage him again to make a decision soon about what he believed and I genuinely thought he was very encouraged and inspired by our playing.
Seeds were planted and we can only trust God for Eric’s salvation and to enlighten his eyes to the truth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Please say a prayer for Eric’s salvation and for him to make a decision soon!
To be continued...
(Don't you hate that! Especially when they did that in the Back to the Future trilogy!)
Wow...what a first week of tour. I am definitely super exhausted and spent but it was definitely all worth it.
The first day on the bus I read the parable of the sower and felt the burden to pray for God's Word to fall on good soil.
Last night I read the first two chapters of "Finding Common Ground," by Tim Downs and was struck with the importance of sowing.
"In our zeal for the harvest," He says, "we have forgotten-we have deliberately devalued-the role of those who sow in our generation. In our enthusiasm we have declared harvesting our exclusive domain, forgetting that we have reaped the benefits of someone else's labor-the labor of sowers-and that we are also responsible to sow, or the next generation of Christians will have nothing to reap."
I must admit I was a bit disappointed I didn't get to share the gospel with one student while on tour, though I had a number of significant conversations and others in BSN also had the same. Part of it was due to personal fears of my own that I still need to get over. But a lot of it was simply the fact that I believe the work God had set out for us to do was mainly sowing for the next generation of Crusade staff and students to reap the benefits of the harvest to come on their campuses.
I would have loved to be able to share the gospel with every student I talked with and have them pray to receive Christ. But as I thought about that more, it was more of a personal ambition of making students my targets and projects to make them convert, rather than being compelled to share with them out of a heart of compassion and love.
To sum up our Chicago tour in one word, it would be sowing.
The Lord brought us to the Chicago metro team to increase Crusade’s visibility on the campuses we were on, build credibility with the student body, to cast vision for how to use Keynote bands in the future, as well as the campus faculty, and to plant seeds that would eventually grow.
We shared the gospel openly and planted seeds. We may never see the fruits of our labor but we trust God with the results.
Benedictine University:
Eric was a student that was pretty much right there with us from the moment we arrived on campus. He was a fellow drummer so we pretty much clicked right away and talked about all sorts of fun drum stuff. Yes, I acquired another admirer of the bass drum cannon. hehehehe
And yes, I have named the bass drum. SHE has been affectionately named...”La-fawn-duh”. No, that is not a typo, it is spelled as it reads. I named her in honor of Napoleon Dynamite and because she's the perfect drum for me-"my soul mate" as Uncle Rico would say. :)
Ahem, anyways, back to Eric. He told me he was taking a class on evolution and also a class on Buddhism and Hinduism. We started to talk about evolution a bit and about the stake that’s been driven between science and religion, one that we both felt was unnecessary.
We started talking a bit about the bible and its credibility as a historical document and he just believed it was fabled and basically couldn’t really believe that all that was written inside could be true. I told him about the fact that there are over 1100 copies of the New Testament and only a handful, if that many, of copies of the writings of Socrates and Plato, yet the latter we don’t question, while the former is always in question.
I cut to the chase and expressed how I felt that the reason why people probably don’t want to believe in its historicity is that it forces people to decide then what they really believe about what’s written, especially what Jesus says about himself. And people don’t like that.
We talked about Darwin and I asked him about absolute truth, to which he didn’t have an opinion of either way. When I asked him what he believed personally, he said he had yet to come to a decision and felt he was only 23 and still too young to decide. I just kind of nodded and encouraged him to make a decision soon.
I wish I said that he didn’t know when he was going to die and that this was the most important decision he could make but I guess I didn’t want to force the issue. After our concert, before he left, I did encourage him again to make a decision soon about what he believed and I genuinely thought he was very encouraged and inspired by our playing.
Seeds were planted and we can only trust God for Eric’s salvation and to enlighten his eyes to the truth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Please say a prayer for Eric’s salvation and for him to make a decision soon!
To be continued...
(Don't you hate that! Especially when they did that in the Back to the Future trilogy!)
This entry was posted by Christopher Wu, on
Monday, September 12, 2005.
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