Another day at the park

On Sunday mornings, Pastor Ben and I meet at Arbor Hills Nature Preserve in Plano, TX to read for Project Ezra, preach the Gospel, hand out bottles of water and distribute Gospel tracts. Often David, Josh and / or Brendan will join us. Recently, our efforts have reached a lot of resistance. Fortunately, the Plano Police have been there to defend out rights.

Sunday was more of the same.

I arrived at the park at 8AM. I walked to the spot where we set up. Opened the cooler of water, set up the preaching stool, put down my Bible and prayed. Then I looked up and offered the guy walking by a bottle of water. He said, “you don’t remember me, do you?” Turns out he was the atheist who had called the police on us about two months ago. I began to engage him in conversation and got him talking about his background. He made some bold claims both about science and the Bible. When I asked for details he would say, “it doesn’t matter, you won’t listen anyway.” He said that on several occassions when I asked for clarification. His speech was filled with various cuss words and blasphemy of God. Eventually he announced his conclusion that Jesus died because of a talking snake and a magic tree. Then he walked off and said he was going to call the police. The amazing thing was that I had not even preached or shared a tract with anyone yet!

As he walked off, I got up and started reading the Gospel of Mark starting in Chapter 1. About that time Pastor Ben arrived with Josh and I filled them in on what had happened. We read from Mark rotating chapters.

About a half an hour later the atheist came back and asked if the police had come. I told him no. Then he got angry, took out his phone and called the police again. We tried again to engage him in conversation. He kept saying that we should not be there. Finally, Ben got up and preached again. At that, the atheist started heckling him. As he was saying “you should not be here” another guy at the park walked by and told him that if he did not want to hear what we had to say he should just walk off.

At that he started to walk off, then came back threatening to call his attorney and sue me or something. I am not sure exactly what he thought his attorney would do. He asked for my contact information. So I gave him one of our “Reject Jesus” Gospel tracts that has our Google Voice number on the back. He looked at it and claimed it could not be my number because the area code was not local. I said, “well if you won’t believe something simple like that this is my phone number, then I can’t expect you to believe anything I say.” You should have seen the shock on his face when he called the number and I answered.

A few minutes later, two police cars arrived. One of the officers was the same officer I had spoken too a few weeks earlier when someone else had called the police. The officer asked me where the man is who had been harassing and cussing at me. I pointed him out. The officer went over to him and explained that what we were doing was perfectly legal and actually a right granted us in this country. He then explained that harassing and cussing at people is not allowed. The officer asked me if I wanted to press charges. I said, “no”. The officer then took the mans identification and spoke with him for another 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile, I got back on the box and read some more of the scripture.

Eventually the officer came over to me explained the conversation he had had with the man and reiterated that we were doing nothing wrong. I thanked him for his time and he left. (Before you ask, no I did not witness to the officer because I did that last time and learned that he is a believer!)

Now, the truly amazing part of the story happened after we left.

While I was driving to church I got a text saying “you win, you were right, thanks for not pressing charges, that truly showed the love of Jesus Christ.”

But wait, that is not all. While I was in church, he called me on the phone and left a message of apology. So after church I called him back. He apologized, said he was out of line, hurting, asked for forgiveness and said he would not bother us again. I told him that I forgave him and offered to help him in any way that I could. He said he might take me up on that. And then ended the call saying “God bless you”.

Please pray for God to work on him and lead him to salvation.