The excitement of everything was overwhelming. Not necessarily in a bad way, it's just like how a kid gets that one thing he thought he would never get as a birthday present and is speechless. We pretty much ran on adrenaline (our bodies caffeine). The jet lag still had and effect on us. We would be busy all day while walking and then get back and stay up late. About 6-6 1/2 hours was it. But I was happy. I was syked to even be there just doing everything for God.
Second Day in the Field
From then on we were allowed to start talking to people. We couldn't bring up God, they had to bring up religion first.
We prayer walked our usual place that day. We tried saying "hi" to people and start up conversations with fellow Muslims. Stephanie and I were together for awhile. We didn't really start up any conversations. I really wanted to try talking to someone. Just so I could get the feel and get to know someone. I saw a lady watching her child play in the square. She was a Dutch lady who was a German school teacher. Very cool. We didn't really get into religion (boy I really dislike that word) at all and I knew it wasn't going anywhere. But it was nice to get the feel of it.
It was a discouraging day because the ground was hard. A lot of the Dutch people were what we would consider rude, but it's a different culture. The just aren't as open as some others may be. One of the Ms over there said that near our area was Amsterdam's largest mosque. We walked over to the mosque and prayer walked. About a couple blocks away from the mosque there was a Baptist church there. We all walked over there to see if we could go inside. It was looked up and sealed tight as a drum. One of our leaders T-Mac prayed, "God if you want us here, please open the doors for us." (Paraphrased). So next to the church was the pastor's house. T-Mac must have knocked on the door to the guy's house or he just saw us and came out. All I saw was that he was there. Standing in confusion and wonder. We were let into the church and we prayed for it. The church was closing because there weren't enough people supporting... It's heart shattering. When you walked into the church, you can feel that what once was something great, is now soon to be gone. Knowing that God is doing ancient work is the only hope. We left the church, and headed to our Doner place for dinner. We all decided to go back to that area for prayer walking. After dinner we headed back to our hostel.
We all shared about our day. Although it was discouraging, we couldn't give up. We wanted to keep pressing on. We prayed about our days and just thought about what it was like for our first time to sow in Amsterdam.
Third Day in the Field
Well we had our usual morning routine and we went to the mosque. Our trek found a spot and we spread out. Julia and I were together. We saw more people and more Muslims in that area. Julia and I prayed for God to show us someone to talk to. Almost instantly Julia and I saw three Muslim women by a fountain. We both thought that it was a good idea to try and talk to them. They were eating cookies and hanging out having a break. They were all very nice. One of them spoke English better than the other two, but it wasn't perfect. They all spoke Arabic. (so many languages!) So we asked them about the culture in Amsterdam and their Muslim culture. They brought up their god and that gave us the change to say that we believe in a God. We had an awesome conversation with them. We mostly talked about our views of faith. They even agreed to take us to the mosque the next dy We talked for probably an hour. They even gave us the rest of their awesome cookies. When they had to go,
Julia and I went into a grocery store to talk about the mind blowing, God-given experience. We were so excited but we didn't want to make a scene. It was so awesome. That day went very well. When we got back to the hostel we all had some awesome stories to tell and felt better about the mission.
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