A while back I encouraged you to make it a habit to greet everyone you encounter with a smile while looking into their eyes as you do. Even if you don’t feel an emotional love for strangers, I believe that this simple act will grow that love and your confidence. Remember, most are likely headed to hell. Do you care enough to try to engage them?
After that the next step was to engage in casual conversation based on something you notice about them and can bring up. Of course the desire would be to move it to spiritual things if possible. Here are two recent examples from one grocery store trip. Both moved spiritual quickly.
Teri and I parked next to a woman unloading her cart. I asked if I could return her cart for her. She said, “Yes.” As I went over to grab the cart, I noticed something about witches on her T-shirt so I asked if she was a witch. She said “Yes.”
With a sad expression, I said, “We are all dying.” She agreed. Then I said, “There will be no witches in Heaven.” She gave me a funny expression and got into her car. Hopefully, that was a small pebble in her shoe to cause her to think about her sad hopes for eternity.
Then as I entered the store, a middle-aged man was briskly walking up behind me. As he approached, I said, “I’d better get out of the way of a man in a big hurry.” He replied, and I continued a conversation with him. He had an amazing story that came out quickly with a few leading questions. He had lived a life of drug and alcohol abuse, was saved after a divorce, works seven days a week with two jobs, is barely surviving financially, and now is passionate for Christ. He desperately needed solid biblical teaching but relied only on YouTube for that. I encouraged him to try a local church but he didn’t seem interested in that. Within sixty seconds I encountered two extremes.
How are you doing with your conversations? In the first example, I could quickly go spiritual based on the words of the t-shirt. With the second one, I simply guided it with a few leading questions.
“Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men” (Matthew 5:13).