This afternoon I took a break from doorknocking to get a drink and a completo (I'd skipped lunch). A completo is a hot dog, in more of a roll than a bun, and it generally has tomatoes, avocado, and mayonaise. To my surprise the couple sitting next to me were speaking German. So I asked them in Spanish where they were from. They told me Germany, and once they found out I was from the U.S. they switched to English because they are more familiar with it. We had a nice conversation and I was able to go out of my way to help them on their journey. They are on a one year vacation in South America, and they are about 9 months through it. Crazy! They have been all over Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. The man's name was Stephen. When I mentioned to him that he was named after the first Christian martyr in the Bible he said that he'd never heard of him and that he'd never read the Bible.
When I was in Los Angeles, a region with well over 100 spoken languages, I kept over 100 different languages of gospel tracts in my car at all times. I gave out tracts in some of the weirdest languages! Chinese, Farsi, Urdu, Kannada, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Hindi, Portuguese, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Indonesian, Telugu, Italian, French, Thai, Malayalam, Burmese, Sinhalese, Amharic, Romanian, Khmer, Greek, Ilokano, Tagalog, Cebuano, Hmong, and, well, others that don't come to mind. Praise the Lord for Chick Publications (http://www.chick.com/catalog/TractLookUp.asp) who made most of those languages available to me, and a shout out for Lifegate's God's Simple Plan tract that was always my backup (http://www.godssimpleplan.org/info/languages.html).
When I was coming to Chile I brought a lot of languages that I knew were spoken in Chile, among those were Chinese, French, Portuguese, English, and German! I was so blessed to walk out to my car and find a pack of Chick tracts in German. I gave two to the couple and they were also pleasantly surprised! I hope God will use those tracts greatly.
Wow, that's so cool! I didn't even know Chick Tracts came in so many languages!
ReplyDeleteDavid should be ashamed of himself! All family members of employees are supposed to have the catalog memorized ;) It really is a blessing that they have so many languages available. To see a foreigner's face light up when they are handed something in their own language is SO cool. I remember one time at the gym I gave this Russian gal three tracts in Russian, she FLIPPED! Even though her English was fine (with a strong accent), it seemed to mean a lot to her to get something in her mother tongue.
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