We have lecture everyday from 9 to noon. Same speaker every weekday for a week. We have really good lecturers here. Here's a sample of one day of preaching.
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When I grew up, I was in a gang. Our school building was made up of 4 halls, arranged in the shape of a giant rectangle with the blacktop courtyard in the middle of the rectangle. Once, my gang members and I stole a tombstone, lifted it over the school building into the courtyard, and cemented it to our turf (our piece of the courtyard that stood around at all day). Once, I stole a teacher's car, and did donuts in the lawn of the school. I had teachers who would give me an A as long as I agreed to not show up in their class and to leave them alone.
There was this girl in our school who was really good-looking, and she was a Christian. Every single day, my best friend and fellow gang member, Mike, would ask her out, and she would say no. But then after a couple months, she says yes on the condition that she drives. She took him to church and he got saved.
Everyday he started telling me about Jesus, and I would hit him and spit on him and excommunicated him from our gang, so he started telling me about Jesus from a distance, for two years. One of my friends, an enormous guy, said he heard about these church services where they were praying for people and the people were falling down whenever they got pray for. He decided to go to one so that he could prove that no one could knock him down. At the end of the sermon, they ask people to come down for prayer, and he jumps out of his seat and starts running down because he wants to be the first one for prayer just to prove that it wouldn't affect him. When he gets ten feet from the stage, it's as if he ran into an invisible concrete wall. He fell over backwards and was knocked unconscious for 30 minutes, even though, as everyone in the church could see, there was nothing there in the spot he seemed to crash into something. He got saved that night.
After a couple years, I eventually gave in to my best friend Mike's invitation to go to an evangelistic meeting. I went and hated it. But at the altar call, I couldn't explain it when I felt myself stand. I tried to sit back down but my knees wouldn't bend. People were pushing me to the front, but the stage ran out of room, so the speaker told us to just stand there. I stood and listened, but then ran out. But then I went home. My mom freaked out that I was home on a Friday night, because I never came home on Friday nights. I just went to bed and woke up in the morning.
When I woke up, I started freaking out, because I wasn't shaking. I'd been heavy into drugs from ages 11 to 18, so it was normal to me. (He's describing DT.) Anways, I went to work that morning.
I worked as a cleaner for high rise buildings, because as soon as the supervisor left, me and my friends used to steal massive amounts of equipment from the buildings everyday so that we could buy drugs. But this morning, my friend said, "Let's go." And my knees locked again. And then I couldn't believe it when my mouth said, "I don't want to steal anymore." I called Mike and said, "What did you do to me?!" He said, "It's Jesus! It's Jesus!"
So he gets me to church and I pray, "God, it's me, Don Gillman. I'm down here. (As if saying 'here' would clarify things for Him.) I know I've done a lot of bad things. I'm sorry."
I became a Christian, met and married my wife, started a construction business, and then joined YWAM.
One of the guys I met in YWAM was an Indian guy named Simon. He was weird cause when we'd hang out in town he'd want to walk and hold hands with me, cause men do that in his culture, and I had to always keep hitting his hand away.
Simon used to be an alcoholic street fighter. One night, a white lady throws something out of a cab towards him, and he was curious what a white lady would throw out of a cab, and so he bends down and picks it up, and he's too drunk to read it. So he sticks it in his pocket, and the next morning, he reads the gospel tract. He becomes a Christian from that. He joins YWAM and eventually helps the Bible get translated into the dialect of his tribe in north eastern India for the first time. All that came from the courage of a white lady who was too timid to do anything more than toss a track out the crack of a window, and she will never know what all that little act of faith led to.
"
The End. I left out a lot from that day. But there's a snapshot of it.
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