Incredible Response from Gary Peterson

Incredible response!

People must be praying because I have never seen results like this!

I’m currently working a Wycliffe/Wordspring booth at a Florida Christian Educators conference in downtown Orlando at a large hotel off the huge Florida Mall. I brought around 500 brochures to hand out to teachers/administrators/teachers assistants and guests at the conference, not really expecting to give our half of them away.

Oh me of little faith! Halfway through the morning I had to call the office and ask for more – another 250-500 should more than do, I thought. I figured I must have talked with most people coming to this event by now. I confess I laughed when my boss showed up with another 1500. But by the end of the day I had gone through almost half of those, and I have another 6+ hours of conference to go today.

I have never seen such a response in all my years in Wycliffe. It is nothing short of remarkable. I can only attribute it to the prayers of His people.

Pray that these folk will follow through and that we will see much fruit for the kingdom. Pray that not only the teachers will be impacted, but their students and their parents as well. The potential long term effect could be tremendous.

Incredible opportunity

As I said, this is a Christian educators’ conference, and our display is on the second floor outside the conference rooms were they are holding workshops. So it was a real surprise when 3 kids stopped at my booth to admire my soccer ball that has “Jesus Loves You” in 63 languages on it. What were kids doing in the middle of this conference? When one of them asked me about the ball I was taken aback!

“What part of Australia are you from?” I asked. My sister and I are from Perth (where Robyn’s sister & family are, along with other relatives). “I’m from England” said the other boy. “We’ve been here on holiday for a week at Disney.” To make a long story short, they somehow wandered in to this convention and “happened” by my display. Within 5 minutes I discovered they knew little about God, so I started to explain the Gospel to them. The first lad (Harry) stood there listening intently while I went through the plan of salvation (the other two popping in and out from time to time, but hearing most of it). A couple of teachers had stopped by the booth while I was talking, but they quietly waited while I shared. Finally Harry’s sister said “We’ve got to go” and they were gone. The two teachers looked at me and said – “That was amazing!”

Not more than 15 minutes later two young men in their late teens/early twenties stopped by to look at my “Da Jesus Book” – the Hawaii Pidgin New Testament I also had on the table. I thought they might be part of the conference, though they looked a bit out of place with their body piercings and all. I opened the book and had one of them read John 3:16: “God wen get so plenny love an aloha fo da peopo inside da world, dat he wen send me, his one an ony Boy, so dat everybody dat trus me no get cut off from God, but get da real kine life dat stay to da max foeva.” Turns out they too knew little about God, so I got a chance to explain the Gospel to them as well. Incredible! They didn’t pray to receive Christ (they left when the teachers started coming out of the workshops), but I pray they will find a Bible and someone else to continue sharing with them.

Not more than 20 minutes later (after the teachers had gone back into another session) a middle aged lady walked by the booth, and I just greeted her. She had a conference tag on, so again I assumed she was a teacher/administrator. But the Lord led me to ask some probing questions, and I quickly discovered she didn’t have a relationship with Christ. In 5 minutes I got to again lay out the plan of salvation for her. Turns out she was a vendor at this conference (not sure what she’s selling). I gave her my card and encouraged her to call if she wanted to talk some more.

I sure wasn’t expecting to share Christ at a Christian convention, but God had to have orchestrated these appointments. Pray for these folk and for any other opportunities God brings our way.

Pray for Josiah too. He’s had some remarkable opportunities to share the gospel with a Muslim student at school. Pray for continued opportunities in his incredible mission field called “school”.

Brimming with gratitude to God for your partnership in all of this!
Gary