Sunday, December 13, 2009

Status Update

On Saturday, I visited 35 house, shared the Gospel one on one with 13 people, gathered 11 prayer requests and collected 86 food items. This brings the totals to 445, 122 one on one conversations, 80 prayer requests and 347 food items collected. The map below shows the area covered. The push pin in my house. I use the highlighter to track where I have been. Thanks for your continued prayers for this effort.

Are you ready to get started going door to door? I have created a map to keep track of people going door to door in their community. If you would like to be added to the map as a participant, then please contact me.

A good problem

On Saturday, I went out door to door for two hours. I changed my tactics slightly for this day. Instead of collecting food for MetroCrest, I decided earlier in the week to collect the food for "a family in need." You see, my wifes family has decided that this Christmas rather than exchanging gifts with the adults we would adopt a family in the community and give gifts to them! When we looked at the needs, we realized food was a big one. So, I prayerfully decided to designate the food collected on this trip into the neighborhood to give directly to this family. Instead of my normal "MetroCrest" flyer that I put on my clip board, I made a flyer describing a "Bezeugen Ministries food drive to benefit a family in need in the neighborhood." With that, I set out.

As I proceeded down the street, I was overwhelmed with generous food donations. People were giving more than normally. In the past each house that gave would give a couple (maybe three) cans of food. But, on this day, the bags were coming back with five, six, seven and up to ten cans of food in them. As I continued down the street, I had to stop and rearrange the food in the cart. Then as I went to a couple of more houses, the cart was overflowing again. By this time I was a half a mile from home. I did not want to "waste time" walking back home to put the food away and not be able to stop at any houses since I could not carry any more food. So I called my wife to see if she could come and pick up the food. However, she was not nearby so she could not. I continued on anyway and was sharing the Gospel at each house. Finally, I had so much food that it would not stay in the cart. The cart was full and I had two full bags of food in my hand. And I was a full half mile from home as I came back up the other side of the street. I posted a message to facebook thinking maybe one of my friends could come and pick up the food. However, I got no response.

Finally, as I prayed the Lord lead me to an answer. I had just spoken with a believer on the other side of the street. I went back to their house and told them my delimma. I asked if I could ust leave the food on their porch for an hour and a half and then I would come back for it. They agreed. I lightened my load and proceeded on up the street. Eventually my wife was on her way home and she stopped at that house and picked up the food for me.


On a typical door to door outing, food collections are about 1 can per three houses. On this day, the food collection was nearly three cans per house! After visiting 35 houses, I had collected 86 cans of food to donate to this family. I had also shared the Gospel one on one 13 times and gathered 11 prayer requests.

Please pray for all of the people that I shared the Gospel with that they may come to salvation through Jesus Christ.

How to pray for them if they don't give their name

As I have been going door to door, I take down prayer requests. Some people get added to our prayer list, even if they don't mention a prayer request. How is that, you might ask? If in the course of discussion, it is determined that the person is not a Christian, then I add a prayer request for their salvation. In many of these cases, the person had not given me their name. So, we have ended up with a number of prayer cards that say "Name: not given" or "Name: Unknown". Now God knows who the person is living at such and such an address, so when we pray God knows the need. However, I've found a way to make the pray even more personal. Whitepages.com offers a "reverse lookup!" With reverse lookup you can look up a name based on knowing the address or the phone number. It's not 100 percent - probably due to unlisted and such, but it is at least in the 95 percentile based on searches that I have done. So, next time you are praying over that prayer card where you did not get their name, go look it up in the Whitepages Reverse Lookup!