Spiritual Snobs

I
got back last Wednesday from a week-long vacation to Chicago to visit friends,
family and to attend a wedding. After
this trip I decided that there are no longer any “vacations” in my future but,
rather, mission trips.

When
I got on the plane, I remembered reading something on my friend’s blog about witnessing
to people on planes and I was wondering who I would be talking to. There ended up being no one sitting in my
row, so I put my headphones on and started reading my book (Under Cover by John
Bevere – so good, but that’s for another blog…) About 30 minutes into my flight a man named John changes seats and comes
to my row. He had obviously been
drinking and was hitting on
every woman on the plane. I didn’t even
entertain the thought of talking to him – I just kept reading my Christian book
and listening to my Christian music. Looking
back, I was acting like a major snob.   

Anyway,
of course God stepped in since I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to do, which
is “share the Gospel with ALL” not some. So John reaches over, lifts up my book cover and says “that’s not about
vampires is it?” And I said, “No…it’s
about Jesus.” You should have seen the
look on his face. It was something like “oh
crap, why did I even start talking to her….” But we started talking about God, the World Race, the Ten Commandments…All
kinds of stories and things. Turns out
John is Catholic, he’s married and he’s trying to get it together before he
& his wife have children. We ended
up talking for at least 30 minutes and it was a really great conversation &
he even prayed with me about the World Race. Did anything earth-shattering happen? No. But I talked to a complete
stranger about my faith outside of a “mission trip” or “church activity”
setting. That hasn’t happened a lot in
my life. I knew then that even on “regular
vacations,” I need to be sensitive to the people around me and take
opportunities to talk to people whenever I can. 

And going
back to when I first met John, who am I to decide who should or shouldn’t hear
the Gospel? For years, I was the person
that people were probably thinking, “she’ll never go back to church, she won’t
even listen to anything I’m saying, what’s the point?” But I did. Because I had people in my life that were praying for me every day.  And I had people that would invite me to church
and talk to me about God. Even though I
was living a life against God, people didn’t count me out. And I’m glad because when I hit rock-bottom,
I knew who I could turn to.