Redeeming the Few Days We Have on This Earth
Late yesterday I wrote how Luke's version of the Parable of the Wedding Feast, along with encouragement from a fellow-saint several years ago, gave me the heart to be a "sower of the seed". One way he and I and others from his large church sow the seed of God's Word is by intergrading evangelism into our daily routines or general lifestyle. We routinely deposit [usually] surreptitiously our favorite gospel tracts in public or outdoor spaces.
My friend who put this idea into my head several years ago has his own favorite methodology whenever he shops in supermarkets. He finds the magazine racks at the registers and slips his favorite gospel tract in a few of them virtually every time he shops.
When I started doing this, I was in a lot better health than I am currently, so I would literally walk entire s/f neighborhoods and leave my favorite tract hanging in a plastic door knob hanger. I have even walked through large ungated apartment or condo communities to hang my tracts. But as my lower back problems worsened, along with my sciatica, I adopted my buddy's shopping idea. However, I prefer leaving tracts tucked under people's windshield wipers (still in the plastic door knob bags) in parking lots. I usually grab 4 or 5 from my stash in my car and on my way into a store, leave them on people's windshields. The reason I still use the small plastic door hanger bags is because I don't want to irritate or anger anyone if it should rain and the tracts disintegrate on the windshield and under the wiper blade and makes a mess they have to clean up. Another advantage to using the plastic bags is that they're easy to leave on motorcycles or scooters.
I would say on average, I deposit at least 10 tracts a week on my shopping trips. I really have no idea how many tracts over the years I have have hung. Certainly many thousands -- perhaps even tens of thousands. I just recently had some extensive chiropractic therapy on three of my lower back discs, so I'm hopeful that over time my condition will continue to improve so that I'll be able to get out once again and walk good distances comfortably. I would dearly love to revisit those earlier communities that I walked years ago to leave more tracts.
The designer of my favorite tract wisely left a small block of empty space on the last page of the 4-page tract so that one could buy a stamp to leave other information, such as the name of one's church or the URLs of well known, conservative evangelical websites as additional gospel resources, e.g. Sermon Audio, etc.
In closing, I do want to make it clear that I don't consider this method of evangelism a way to usurp our responsibility from one-on-one, personal evangelism. I consider this latter type of evangelism to be the best for several reasons -- one of them being the opportunity to share our own personal testimony, which cannot be done with tract handouts. Another reason is that unbelievers' own questions or concerns usually cannot be answered adequately by tracts. But I do consider tracts to be an important way of supplementing personal evangelism because we become conscious of our great privilege daily to go out into the world and spread the Word on a routine basis. It's a way of cultivating a good habit to the point where it becomes second nature to us.
Further, people have come to saving knowledge by reading a simple tract, just as some have come to saving knowledge of the Lord by reading the biggest "tract" of them all -- the Holy Bible. So, this brings me back full circle to where I started with Luke's version of the Parable of the Wedding Feast: I know that at the end of the day, no matter how one is evangelized, it will be the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit to open up anyone's heart to receive the gospel truth, as God did with Lydia. This is not my job, for it is well above my pay grade. And this is what strongly motivates me to evangelize in this manner. And my hope and prayer is that it will motivate each of you as well to routinely become "fishers of men" by also integrading this type of evangelism into your lifestyle. In fact, whenever I see any vehicle with any kind of Christian symbol or message on it, I make it point to leave a tract on that vehicle as a hint to go and do likewise.
