I am all shaken up inside. I am spun around and turned upside down. I am also exhausted. This is all for the best of reasons. I had the incredible blessing last night to spend two hours sitting in a pub and discussing God and Christianity with some of my summer Frisbee teammates. I am still puzzling over the conversation. I couldn't seem to help myself. Every topic led me mentally straight back to Christianity, and then I started talking.

Pray for Marcus, Hilary, Jeff, and Mike - Marcus and Hilary especially. I think God is pursuing them. Events just fit together too much yesterday evening for it to be coincidence. And they both wanted to hear. They kept me talking. Marcus, my team captain, sat silently making direct eye contact. When I mentioned at one point that maybe I should change the subject now, he assured me that he didn't mind if I kept talking. Hilary, on the other hand, continually made the "that's your truth" argument, but she was listening too. At the time I thought she didn't want to hear, but thinking back I realize the situation was quite the contrary. She was prolonging the topic, and she wanted her arguments defeated.

I've been praying for my entire Frisbee team ever since I first met its members. I didn't remember last night that I had prayed for Hilary and Marcus specifically the week before, but I recalled it this morning. God answers prayer. After I had shared the Gospel via my own experience as a sinner and had discussed the existence of absolute truth, the conversation revealed some interesting facts:

- Marcus normally rides his bike from his apartment in STL to the park where we all play Frisbee, five miles away. Hilary gave him and a bike a lift in her SUV to a pub in his neighborhood, and he decided to ride his bike down to his apartment a few blocks away and leave it there while Hilary and I went into the pub and waited. It turned out that in those few blocks, just before he walked back and joined us at our table, he had almost gotten into an accident. One of the first points I brought up, not knowing of his near miss, was the fact of our fragility as human beings, that it is important to think of our eternity now, since we don't know if any day will be our last here on Earth. No wonder he listened with such apparent shock!

- Hilary had heard the PHC students who spoke on NPR a few months ago, and she remembered them as articulate and sensible. She had also read only recently All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot. Evidently, she had been thinking about Christianity.

- One of the major questions brought up was the contrast of Christianity and Islam. Thanks to my aborted attempt to take Modern Middle East History last year, in which I studied and memorized all the "wrong" items - the origins of Islam and its five pillars - for the midterm, I was able to answer! Also, I was able to mention truthfully that I had ordered the Koran off of Amazon for my upcoming History of Islam course, and that I planned to read it. I ordered my books for that course only last Saturday, two days before the conversation.

- Another major topic concerned the authenticity of Scripture. Only this past Sunday, the day before the conversation, I listened with avid interest to my pastor's Sunday School lesson concerning the process of canonization. This has also been one of my own consuming questions for two years now, requiring me to study what I can find in order to satisfy my own curiosity. I have wondered before why I felt compelled to study the topic, why I couldn't just accept its truth and move on. Now I know part of the reason. God was preparing me for this very time and place.

I left the pub at about 10:40 because I had to wake up at 6:30 this morning to help at the kids' drama camp my church is running this week. I didn't want to go, and I said so. The group didn't want me to go either, though we'd switched to discussing Frisbee for the previous fifteen minutes. When the waitress gave us the check, we'd spent half an hour getting everything ready to pay, because everyone was so wrapped up in what we were saying.

Where did the words come from? Why was I not scared? I was very much present in the moment, much more so than I am most of the time. But that wasn't really me talking. That was Someone more than me. I had to tell them the truth. I couldn't not.

I'm too tired to read back through this. I hope that it makes sense as is, and that it isn't too ungrammatical. Pray for these people. Pray that God's irresistable call is ringing in their ears. Pray for my true persistance and love. I'm driving to college in three weeks, but I want to tell my teammates that they can call me anytime, anywhere, if they need to talk. I want that to be true. I also want to invite them to church.

In other news, my pastor is awesome. My sister and I are joining the church we've been visiting for two years, a Presbyterian church. She is going away to college this fall as well, so our pastor and his wife expedited our new members class and invited us to their house this past Saturday morning, where they cooked us breakfast and discussed important theological points for four hours. They are such patient, loving, and wise people. Thanks to Pastor Stain, I finally know what I believe about election and the calling of the saints. PHC's Theology class gave me the key arguments of different positions, but confused me thoroughly. Pastor Stain answered all my questions, no matter how long it took (a talent that is so rare for me to find, and for which I am more grateful than I can say), and walked me through everything. This Sunday afternoon I will walk myself through it again.

The church drama camp has proceeded nicely for two days. I wasn't expecting that I would enjoy it very much before the kids arrived, but then I was enchanted. I am in co-charge of six lovely and precocious young ladies, ages six to nine.
- Gabrielle of the blue eyes and wide cat's smile is mischievous - she loves dancing, but hates to sing. So she doesn't sing. Unfortunately for her, the first hour of the day is all singing.
- Samantha is skinny and not very pretty, but you forget it when she smiles and shows her brilliant soul. She smiles often. She also wants to make kids happy who are shy, and she helps others as naturally as breathing. A leader if I ever saw one.
- Abby is freckled, red-headed, and unbelievably cute. She has one of the longest parts in the drama, but she came back with it almost entirely memorized after one day. Sometimes she looks patiently frustrated when we ask the group to do something together and she does it right the first time, but then we have to make our request easier because some of the other kids didn't get it.
- Sarah has huge, expressive eyes, but she doesn't smile as much as the others nor talk very much. When she tries to memorize her lines she remembers the meaning instead of the exact words. I took her away alone outside for ten minutes today to drill, and one time when she couldn't remember what to say she distracted herself by picking up a green walking stick (bug variety, not an actual stick) she saw on the ground.
- Calli is only six years old, and she doesn't talk much either. However, she reads better than almost all the others, and she also came back after one day with almost her entire (long) part memorized. She quietly does all we ask of her, and then adds some more of her own.
- Alyssa is an extremely pretty little girl, also six years old, who has much more trouble than the others with reading and singing. She only has two lines in the play, but she delivers them with a natural personality and gusto and makes me grin. :D

That's my current life. I really don't want summer to end, although I am also looking forward to the school year.  ¶ 3:26 PM