man in blue

Divine Appointment: a meeting which was inspired and God-led  

As a part of our ministry each week, we have a block of time set aside for evangelism. We go into downtown San Jose streets or parks. Evangelism could look like sitting and talking to someone, praying for peace over the park, praying over people – it’s different every time. 

Yesterday was our opportunity to go out this week. We split into groups of 2-3 so that in general, we don’t come off as a huge group (both with covid restrictions and also not to intimidate people). So Becca and I started walking together. 

While we were heading to the park, we both decided to pray over it and our time there and ask the Lord to give us a word or highlight something to us for the park. So we do our thing and pray. When we finished, we started talking about what the Lord was speaking to us. Something the Lord revealed to me was “blue shirt”, and Becca was like, “No way, He also gave me the word blue!”

We arrived in the park and most of the other groups headed to another part of the city with one of the translators,  but me and Becca decided to sit down at the park, keep praying and see what the Lord would do. Our other translator, Rachel, sat with us and said the Lord told her to come sit with us. We continued praying together, and then the Lord told me we had to start walking. I told Becca and Rachel and we started walking.

We stopped after walking twenty feet because we saw some other girls from our squad and suddenly, a man stops us and says “My friends have questions for you!” in English. We all followed him to a park bench close by and exchanged names with Andres and his friends Mouses and Gabriel. 

Andres translated for the other two as we talked and said Mouses needed us to pray for him because he had been out of a job for awhile. We started praying over him, while Andres and Gabriel started talking in Spanish off to one side.

They came back when we were done praying, and Gabriel took off his jacket. HIS SHIRT WAS BLUE !

Gabriel then started telling us his testimony through our translator. His mom and grandma are both Christians, but he’s going to school to be a surgeon and his philosophy class has been contradicting what he thought he believed. He asked us how we know that God is real and that Christianity is true. We ended up sharing some parts of our personal testimonies and asked if we could pray for him. At first, he refused because he didn’t think he deserved prayer because he had been drinking a beer this whole time, but before we left we were able to pray over him and his friends as a group. 

Another thing Gabriel mentioned as we talked to him was that he was only in San Jose for the day to get soemthing for school. If we had gone out any other day or even just an hour later, we never would’ve met him.

He also told us about how he wanted to learn more English to be a better surgeon, which opened the door for us to invite him to English Club at the Hope Project. Even though he doesn’t live in the city, our translator spoke to him about it more and asked him to pray about it.

Today evangelising looked like a couple different things. We were able to go and talk and pray over specific people but we also sat and prayed for an hour before that. The Lord used both of those things to bless us, Gabriel, and his friends. If we never asked the Lord for direction at the beginning, we would have left the park with the other group. And if we never continued to pray in the park, we would have never met Gabriel. I was really able to see the Lord work yesterday and it blessed Gabriel too; he kept thanking us for stopping and talking to him. 

Please keep Gabriel and his friends in your prayers that the Lord continues to move in them and that Gabriel will be able to come to English Club, or start learning English somewhere. You can also be praying for us as we continue to evangelise in San Jose and work with the Hope Project.