I don't know how many sermons I have heard from preachers and evangelists about how they were traveling to or from a speaking engagement on an airplane and they pulled out their bible which aroused the curiosity of the passenger next to them, and quicker than a thanksgiving prayer for our dinner, the preacher is discussing the Acts 2:38 message with the passenger. The next thing we hear in the testimony is how accepting the passenger was of the witnessing opportunity. And after the story is finished being recanted, we are told how easy it is for every one of us.
A similar version of the story occurs with not the bible as the introduction into the witnessing, but rather conversation beginning when the evangelist announcing that he is a preacher by trade.
Never mind that the passenger has to be nice because they have to sit next to the preacher for the entirety of the trip and they want the awkwardness to be minimal, and never mind that the passenger does not have an escape from the conversation since they are kinda tied into their seat via seatbelt. And never mind that it is somewhat questionable that the preacher's only witnessing opportunities are occurring on airplanes which seems to be the only time the preacher is making himself available in public because he is traveling from his home church to preach at a different church across the country.
The point is we sit in our pews hearing these testimonies wishing we had the same chutzpah (that's yiddish for aggressiveness) that the speaker did to witness to a stranger blindly. And we go to the alter praying that God would make better witnessess out of us in conviction expecting that in some magical way God will suddenly start witnessing for us and have strangers crawling up to us asking for us to witness to them. The reality is the witnessing will always have to come from us, in boldness or timidity.
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