Welcome back readers to another Joshua blog. This past week has been one of the most stressful but one of the most rewarding weeks of Joshua. Why? Well, we had our LA trip! This is our fourth one out of the five. I can’t believe how much time has passed already. We arrived at Temple Baptist, the church we stayed the night at for the week. Almost instantly we had our final training session which led to us going out in our evangelism groups to separate malls to start evangelizing. Talk about being thrown in the deep end. My group didn’t get very many conversations at this time because we were still pretty nervous to talk to people. In the end we talked to some Jehovah Witnesses and one cool guy that was having people sign partitions. We finished off the day by going to the Griffith Observatory (the same from LaLa Land). We looked over the city of Los Angeles in the night and we took it in that we all had divine appointments down there over the next couple of days. How cool was that?
Day two we went to a food bank and we helped bag lots of produce like carrots, potatoes, apples, and lettuce. By the time our work was over we had bagged and sorted 29,479 pounds of produce! Then it was off to Downtown LA. We all split off into our groups and walked around town to talk to people. One of the guys and I found a cool bookstore downtown where I talked to some people and even met a christian! I didn’t end up talking to a lot of people again but the few I did talk to were either Christians or didn’t want to talk at all. When we all regrouped again we shared stories of the conversations we had. To all our delight one of the groups met a guy that gave his life to Christ right then and there that day! They said that they got him a bible and they walked through some scripture with him. The man then exclaimed that he was hungry for more scripture. Praise be to God! We ended the day by driving through skid row. It was sad to see how people live there and we must keep them in our prayers.
Day three was amazing! It was worldview day where we were given metro tickets and told to explore different worldviews and try new foods. My group went to Chinatown where we explored a dowest temple. Basically the people believe in ying yang there. For lunch we had Vietnamese food. We then walked around Hollywood and had a brief conversation with a psychic. We ended on USC where we had dinner and a fruitful conversation with a student there. I could see the Lord working with her and I pray that she looks more into what we talked about.
Day four was Biola day! We met our professors from our classes that we have only seen on tv from class videos. It was so cool and strange at the same time (it was the equivalent to meeting a celebrity). We stayed at the campus overnight.
Day five was our last evangelism day. We went to UCLA where we met up with Josh and Anett, the Jews for Jesus couple. Through them we were given a survey to give to students to ignite a conversation. I would say I talked to the most amount of people this day then the rest of the week. It was this day that I met an atheist girl (one of the first atheists I met) and our conversation led into me sharing the gospel with her! Thanks be to God and all glory to Him for giving me the words to say. I pray that God continues to soften her heart that she may turn to Christ. We then went and cleaned apartments for Jews for Jesus employees. We ended this day by going to The Upside Down coffee shop which is run by Josh and Annet. We had a shabbat and ate dinner there. After that we went out for dessert. What a great day!
Day six was our last day of our trip. We volunteered at the dream center and helped the employees there by hanging out with the community they are helping. There we prayed with the older people and played with the kids. After that we had our van day out! Our van went to Huninton beach where we sat on the warm sand, played in the waves, and played each other in spike ball. Some even evangelized to people on the pier. It reminded me that God is still at work even when we are on our “day off.” I thank God for this trip and how it has grown me and my fellow Joshua siblings to shine Christ light to others. Until next time!
-Talitha Nason (Current Student)