We arrived in Florida, yesterday. Our boat is not yet ready to live on, so we left our kids on my parents boat and took a room at a motel in a nearby town. I paid for the room with a credit card, but as it turns out, I forgot to get my card back. The missing card was not discovered 'till the next afternoon (today)....causing a little commotion. I called back to the motel and found they had the card. No problem, a bit of an annoyance, but no big deal, right? Wrong!....a divine appointment instead.
Arriving at the motel and asking for my card, I ended up chatting with Dawn, the desk clerk. I began to talk to her about death & learned that she'd been in a near-fatal car crash a couple weeks earlier (still has scrapes on her arms). She and four friends rolled an SUV end over end into a river. She was trapped in the truck, fifteen feet under, finally pulled free by a friend. The attending medical staff at the hospital could apparently not figure out why she survived. They told her that in that type of crash, one's breath is usually knocked out of them, leaving insufficient oxygen for the time she was under water.
A Christian friend has been telling Dawn that God is trying to tell her something & that He has kept her alive for a reason. I explained to her the reason that 'God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance'. I explained to her the inevitability of death; that it should not shock us that someone dies & the only surprise would be as to the timing. All of us will surely die. I explained the righteous standards of God & showed her how she'd failed His standard miserably (as have we all). Dawn began to see that she had failed God's standard & when she stood before God in judgment she would be found guilty and sentenced to eternal damnation in the lake of fire of Hell. Explaining how what seems like an insignificant offense to another human being, is an great offense to God seemed to help (I.e. This makes; 'and all liars shall have their part in the Lake of Fire' make sense).
We were interrupted by motel guests checking in, so I left. Later on, driving by, I dropped in and gave her two tracts (“Are you good enough to go to Heaven?” & “Why Christianity?” both from livingwaters.com). I was going to hand them to her and leave, but she stopped me. If I understood her correctly, her Christian friend had just called her since my previous visit and talked to her again about God trying to get her attention. She asked me where she should be reading her Bible. I told her to read the book of John, for an eye witness account of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ & the book of Romans, for Paul's explanation of Justification by Faith. She kept talking and asking questions. Pray for Dawn.
Something to think about; Dawn is a regular church attender but had not understood the Gospel...didn't seem to have heard it clearly before.
Earlier in the day, a Wal-Mart clerk asked about my “What if?” shirt. I explained that 153,000 people die every day, two every second....what if this were her second? We talked for quite a while about the Gospel. I was amazed because there was no one in line behind us....but all the other tills around us had line-ups. She ended up asking me how to be born again & how could one know if they were born again. I was able to point her to the scriptures and explain. Again, this girl had a history of regular church attendance (though not the recent past). What are churches teaching, if those attending do not even hear the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ?
Currently in Moorehaven, FL,
Glenn.
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