WI Campus Tour and Planned Parenthood

This week the school of evangelism went on the WI Campus tour with MTP.

Missionariestothepreborn.com

We went to UW Oshkosh, Parkside, LaCrosse and Steven’s Point.

Oshkosh was extremely apathetic. The student’s walked by, and most of them didn’t even turn their heads to look at our sign, and didn’t even show of hint of interest in the preaching. A few stopped to talk, and lot’s of literature went out, and needless to say, many did see the signs and the photos of the murdered pre-born, but the apathy was overwhelming.

Tuesday was a lot better… We got to UW Parkside right before the first class break and split up in teams of two and spread out over campus with the Planned Parenthood literature. After that we set up in an area with a lot of foot traffic with signs and preaching. Soon we had a crowd of students asking questions and dialouging with people from our group. A lot of people heard the truth that day and many seeds were planted.

LaCrosse was really good too… Every day this week seemed to get better. By the end of the day we had a group of about 10 students standing in a semi circle around Jason asking sincere questions, and then pausing to think about his answer before asking the next question. A lot of people came up and shook our hands and thanked us for having a rational discussion, and for just talking and answering questions…

Yesterday we were at UW Steven’s Point. They were expecting us, so they wrote things like “UWSP doesn’t discriminate” in chalk on the sidewalk. We went out with lit during the first 2 class breaks and the student body senator came out and told us that we could not be there, we had to be on the sidewalk by the road and that we had to leave or else they would escort us off the campus or arrest us. We informed her that we did have the constitutional right to be there, but that we would talk to the cops when they got there. She told us very rudely that there would be no discussion and that we would be arrested. The police came, and told her that we had the right to be there afterall. So they didn’t bother us. But we had a very busy day, talking to many students about many topics, from abortion, to evolution, a moral standard, homosexuality, abstinence, death penalty, etc… Just about everything. It was a great day and as we spoke with people we could just see them understanding what we were explaining to them. Teeny got to pray with a student Praise God!! Many seeds were planted and we definitely caused a stir on that campus today.

This morning at Planned Parenthood, our hearts broke as we saw women walking in totally hard hearted as we pleaded with them to consider keeping their babies. One woman turned around as she was walking in and said “I was raped. I can’t have this baby.”

We offer help to the women going in, and we will do anything we can to help them if they decide to keep their child. “We care about you and your baby.” I told a young girl, about 17 or 18 going in with her mother. “No you don’t! You don’t care!” She yelled.

A security guard came out to smoke, and we talked to him and asked him how he could be a part of this innocent bloodshed. “I don’t need snot nose brats like you telling me what to do. So shut the Hell up!” He muttered angrily… But many women saw the truth of abortion, and God will work in their hearts. Please continue to pray for our ministry out there as we counsel women.

PRAISE REPORT: Anne has been witnessing to and counselling a woman who was considering abortion. She already has 4 children, 8 and under but is now considering keeping her baby. Please pray for God to move in her heart in a strong way.

Apathy at it’s best.

So the 3rd week of Faithful Soldier ‘08 has begun, and it found us at UW Oshkosh. The campus is largely Republican, so we hoped to get some response from Pro-Life students….. But we got none.

Surprise.

The students went by, one after another, some cursing, some rolling their eyes, the occasional thumbs-up. Most just walked by, not looking left or right, staring straight ahead. The apathy was sickening. How can you be faced with a 5 ft poster of a murdered baby, it’s arms, legs and head ripped from it’s body and just walk by it like everything is good?
Towards the end of the day, a man came up to Lee, looking like he’d just stepped out of The Lord of the Rings. He informed us that his girlfriend had just had an abortion. He had a creepy way of acting, and of simply coming up to us and telling us this. He said it as easily as if he were telling us what color socks he was wearing. No anger, no sadness. Just straight up “My girlfriend just had an abortion.”

After that we went to a busy intersection and set up with our signs for over an hour. The police shut down most of the lit people, but we got out a lot before we were forced to stop.
Tomorrow we’ll be in the Milwaukee area and then we’re on to more campuses around Wisconsin for the rest of the week. Please pray that we will be met with open hearts, hearts that will break when they see what they are doing to their children. Hearts hungry for the truth and righteousness.

The Case for Faith- Summary of Chapter 1 for Faithful Soldier School of Evangelism

The introduction of The Case for Faith spoke about Charles Templeton, previously the close friend and preaching companion of Billy Graham, and how he went from a preacher to an agnostic. He was saved in 1934, and about 15 years later met Billy Graham at a Youth for Christ rally, and from there their friendship grew. But soon after, Templeton became overcome with doubts. He didn’t have the intellectual skills or ability to back up his beliefs, and soon he found himself slipping into agnosticism.
Years later, Lee Strobel went to visit Templeton to find out what caused him to lose his faith in God.
“It was a photograph in Life magazine.” Said Templeton. The photo was of a black woman in Northern Africa. The woman was holding her baby who had died as a result of starvation. “Is it possible to believe that there is a loving and caring creator when all this woman needed was rain?”

In Chapter 1, Strobel brings up several objections. He calls these “The Big Eight.” The first one, and the main focus of Chapter 1, was paralell to the question that Templeton asked when referring to the photo of the woman and her baby. “If there is a loving God, why does this pain-wracked world groan under so much suffering and evil?” In this chapter, Lee struggles to find an answer to this question.
Strobel met with Dr. Peter Kreeft to discuss these question, and to get some insight into the problem of evil. “How in the world would you respond to Templeton?” Strobel asks. “How can a mere finite human be sure that infinite wisdom would not tolerate certain short-range evils in order for more long-range goods that we couldn’t foresee?” Replied Kreeft.
Then he went on to explain the story of the hunter and the bear. How the hunter was trying to help the bear, but to help him needed to inflict more pain. The bear didn’t see the big picture, so he saw the hunter as the enemy, when really the hunter was working for the greater good.
“How can anyone be certain that that’s not an analogy between us and God?” asked Kreeft.  Sometimes we don’t understand why God does the things that He does, just like the bear didn’t understand the hunter’s reasons. We need to trust God, like the bear should’ve trusted the hunter.

Kreeft also brought up the fact that “…the evidence of evil and suffering can go both ways – it can actually be used in favor of God.” By recognizing evil, Templeton is assuming that there is an objective standard, and therefore testifying to the reality of God. “If I give one student 90, and one student 80, that presupposes that one hundred is a real standard. And my point is: if there is no God, where did we get the standard of goodness by which we can judge evil?” “What does it mean that God is all powerful?” Kreeft asked.
He then went on to explain that God can do anything meaningful, possible, and that makes any sense at all. And that he cannot make good evil. Because God is all powerful, He can’t make mistakes. God didn’t create evil, He created the possibility of evil. The evil does not come from God, but from man’s free will. A God who is all powerful could not have created a world in which man has free will, but also in which there is no possibility for evil. “It’s a self-contradiction — a meaningless nothing.” Said Kreeft, “To have a world in which there’s real choice, but at the same time no possibility of choosing evil.” If there is no hate, then there is no love… and real love involves choice.

When God created the world, He made man with the ability to choose whether or not to love Him, or reject Him. It’s not God’s fault that we decided to take that free will, and choose to sin. God’s design was perfect, we are the ones who chose to mess it up. So it’s our fault, not God’s. God’s wisdom is way beyond our understanding. He sees things in a way that we don’t, that sometimes our suffering and our pain could result in a greater good. For example, the death of Jesus on the cross was a horrible thing. The pain was virtually unbearable. But in the end it was the greatest thing that has ever happened. Sometimes we just need to trust God. Through the pain, we can grow and learn and become strong individuals. We might not realize it right away, but the suffering we go through shapes and forms us, and teaches us. At the moment it may seems terrible, painful and cruel, but in the longrun it’s for the better.

God allows us the experience pain, because it teaches us. Kreeft uses a story of his daughter as an example. When she was young she was learning to thread a needle, and she kept failing at it, and poking her finger and making herself bleed. Instead of interjecting to help her, he let her struggle on until finally she learned how to do it and overcame the problems and succeeded. If he had done it for her, she never would’ve learned. God does the same thing. In areas where He could just help us and get rid of the pain and the trials, He lets us get through it and learn from our pain and our mistakes.

“Evil people get away witth hurting others all the time. Certainly God can’t consider that fair.” Said Strobel. “Why doesn’t He intervene and deal with all the evil in the world?” The truth is, people don’t get away with the evil things they do. One day they will be held accountable for all the things that they did and they will definitely not get away with it. We might not realize that right now, but one day they will stand before God and pay for all the things that they did. Keeft gives a good analogy. “….It’s like reading half a novel and criticizing the author for not resolving the plot.” Also, suffering can lead people to repentance. In the Old Testament, pain and suffering turned the Israelites back to God. “That’s what’s so striking about Kushners book: When bad things happen to good people” Strobel said. “How is that fair?” Kreeft’s response was that there are no good people.

Kreeft made a good point that any mature Christian can look on his or her life and see moments and times of pain and suffering that in the end resulted in them being drawn closer to God. Before hand they might not see how the suffering could help them, but afterwards they see how much they learned from it, and how it strengthened them in ways they never would’ve realized. That without the weakness, God, by His grace,  would never have been able to give them the strength. Kreeft quotes Saint Teresa saying “In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth… will seem like one night at an inconvenient hotel.”

Pain and suffering does not disprove God’s existance. Like it said at the beginning of the chapter, without evil, there cannot be good. Without hate, there cannot be true love. And the fact that there is evil shows that there is an objective standard. We as humans have only a limited view and understanding of life and God, just like the bear had a limited understanding of the hunter’s reasons for what he was doing. Pain and suffering is not necessarily bad because in the long run it shapes us into better people.