One week we were doing a cookie outreach down at Belmont Park along with sharing on the beach. It was the week after staff left, I think, and we didn’t go to campus that week. I remember that Todd and I were walking along the beach half talking to each other about our Cru movement at NDSU and half looking for people to talk to. We were getting a little frustrated both with the lack of interest in people wanting to talk to us and our own lack of enthusiasm for sharing. So I prayed something to this effect: “God, just show us who you want us to talk to, make it blantantly obvious God. Amen.” Within minutes, we soon realized that we had come to a part of the beach that was not nearly as packed and crowded as the part we had just come from. In fact there was absolutely nobody. That’s when I noticed him. He was sitting all alone on the beach, with nobody withing about 200 or 300 feet around him in any direction. I thought, “haha God, that is waaaay too obvious.” So Todd and I went up to him and we talked to him. His story was a fascinating one. He was 21 or 22 and was from Tennessee. He had seen the Atlantic Ocean many times, but never the Pacific and so he decided that he would come out San Diego so that he could watch the waves crash from West to East rather from the East to the West. I was dumbfounded. He had traveled thousands of miles to see the waves crash in the opposite direction?!?! Well we went through our Quest survey with him and discovered that he was actually broke (maybe its because he traveled so far for the waves) and that he was definitely missing something in his life. When we started talking about God, he was more than willing to talk about it. He said that he would believe in God, but that he needed God to reach out to him. I thought in my mind, “Look around you. There is no one anywhere near you, and the two of us come out of nowhere to tell you about God. Don’t you think that God could have orchestrated this?” but I didn’t say it. He said that he just needed to see God, that he needed God to show himself to him before he could believe. In a sense I was crushed. There was nothing I could do. I had shared the gospel and I could go on sharing all I knew about God with Brian, but it wouldn’t make a difference. He wanted to see God himself work in his life. At the same time that I was crushed, I was pretty excited, because if this kid was going to come to know Christ, he would do it because he truly and really beleived it because the Lord of the Universe really touched him and he knew it was him.
Every now and then I take out my notebook and go through the list of the people that I talked to this summer and I pray for them. I don’t know what is going in their lives right now. I hope that each of them is being called to God, that they are seeking him, that some if not all have come to know Christ. I pray for Brian today and I ask you to pray for him too. I don’t know if he made it out of San Diego, or if he is still there, with little money. But I know that his heart thirsts for God. Pray that God will move in a big way, that he will scoop this man up, clean him off, and send him on the biggest adventure of his life, much bigger than travelling thousands of miles to see the waves crash the opposite direction.
