Shaking Hands With Albert

Hola mis amigos!

Yesterday, my team split to help the other two campus teams with outreaches that they were having on their campuses. I went with the City College group to Harlem. Their outreach focused on love and relationships and also incorporated surveys to help lead into spiritual conversations. We were going to set up a table on campus to give away free water bottles, Bibles, Christian books, and highlighters with information about the ministry but the school changed its mind about letting us set up the table. Therefore, we moved to the public sidewalk to set up and had a lot of success gathering contacts.

I went with my friend Jordan to do Soularium around campus while some of the others where at the table. He and I first spoke with a Mulsim guy who told us a lot about his religion. I always enjoy meeting people of other faiths who can inform me about what they believe. The cool thing is, like the guy that we met, a lot of people are curious about Christianity and have a lot of questions about it.

The second person I talked to was dressed in all white, traditional African attire and told us she was an African priestess. She was really excited to talk because she said she was an extremely spiritual person. She grew up in a Christian home with pastors as parents but decided Christianity was not for her. She told us that she practiced a West African religion that was a mixture of various religions. We talked for over an hour and it was really neat to learn her perspective. At the same time, it was sad because we could see that she was missing the most important piece of the puzzle (Jesus).

Last night for our Monday night meeting, the entire project went out on the streets to hand out food to homeless people. Once we got to our designated locations, we were further split into pairs and were given lunch bags to hand out. My partner and I prayer walked for a long time searching for homelss people to give to, but we were not able to find any. This was strange because on a normal day, we see many homeless people. We finally found a man after about 45 minutes of walking who was searching through a trashcan. My partner asked him if he was hungry and we gave him a bag. Almost immediately, he started eating and smiled at us, almost crying. We shook hands with him and he told us his name was Albert. He was very grateful for the food. We asked if he wanted any help finding anywhere for shelter but he said no. On our way back to the meeting place, we ran into two more people who gladly accepted food but didn't want any more help.

It is cool to think about the fact that about 100 people went out with at least one bag per person. If all were handed away, that is 100 homeless people who received dinner in NYC that night.

Quite an exhausting day! But full of God! And the day was completed with some Yogurtland of course ;)