Give me words to speak

I fall so short. All the time. In every area.

But one area in which I've been feeling particularly short recently is the whole evangelizing thing. Sometimes I just don't open my mouth for the Lord. If someone wants to make the first move and ask me, then I'll talk, but otherwise? I just don't. Which is terrible, I fully recognize this.

For instance, as my brother and I were walking home from meeting one evening recently, we saw a guy wondering around some bushes with a flashlight. So, naturally, we stopped and asked him if we could be of any assistance. Turns out he'd lost the battery for his cell phone, and his wife was quite upset, so he was looking for it in the dark. So, we helped him look for it for a while, and when we all came up empty-handed, he said to just forget it, he'd look tomorrow.

So I told him I really hoped he found it, and I was sorry that he'd lost it. At which point, the guy called over his shoulder (he was walking away from us in rather a huff), "What's the point, this whole life is miserable and nothing goes right anyhow and she's going to kill me and nothing good happens..." His rather run-on sentence went on for a while, at least until my brother and I could no longer hear him, and that was that.

But I remember standing there thinking: should I be running after him? Because I know that there are good things in life, I know it's not all miserable! I have Jesus living in my heart! I apparently know something this guy doesn't know!

But I stood there and watched him go. I didn't even holler a "JESUS SAVES!" after him or anything.

I could justify my way out of that one, since he'd been walking away and everything, but recently I had another experience where I just didn't open my mouth, and really could have.

I was walking home from meeting on a Sunday afternoon, and in one of the parking lots I cut across (I believe in efficiency) I came across a group of old people, just sitting around in lawn chairs. So they asked me how my day was, what I'd accomplished, what I did for work, all that stuff. I told them a little about me, and one of the things I mentioned was that I taught Sunday School.

So one old dude told this story that went something as follows, "I taught Sunday School to high school students, and they were wondering how God could have made man after the cave men were already around, and so I explained that man wasn't really man until God put a soul in him."

I remember standing there looking at this guy thinking, "Wh-huh?" And I was still trying to work out his logic when some other guy started talking to me about job stuff and another old guy started asking me how I felt about Obama.

But again, that's no excuse! I shouldn't have let him tell such a completely weird thing and get away with it. Sure, he was old, but he's talking about my Saviour, here. I should be able to jump in and be like, "Oh, actually, I was just reading His letter the other day and I'm pretty sure you got it all wrong."

Ack. Like I said, I fall so short it's depressing.