Day Six

Hi friends, today was good...kind of. We had our friends from the Madrid church arrive today to help us go sharing and translate for us. We were blessed to have Gina come with our group. She was able to help us right away starting from the train ride to our destination. She was able to help Jason share with some boys from Venezuela. We arrived at the Universitat again and I went with Gina and Nick sharing. It was interesting how so far during this trip I have been blessed with approaching people that can speak enough English and I can speak enough Spanish to communicate the Gospel but today we just kept running into people that knew very little English. Gina did a very good job trying to help us communicate and when we found ourselves in a rut she was very good about taking over and going through the whole Gospel and then handing them tracts to end our conversations. Even with Gina though the morning was still a bit discouraging. So far on this trip I have yet to have a conversation with someone who is soft and who really desires to know more about what we are saying.

The encouraging part of the day was when we went back to Iftikar's place for lunch. Iftikar is originally from Pakistan and I will stand by the fact that I believe Bollywood is an international language! When his employee was making my food I asked him if he was a fan of Shahrukh Khan and when I told him that I loved Shahrukh he told his employee that I should get extra meat in my wrap because I am a Bollywood fan. I think the fact that I was able to bond with him over Bollywood was why Jason later asked me if I would go with him and Gina to go talk with Iftikar again about the Gospel. He is Muslim and he spoke with Gina the majority of the time because he speaks Spanish much more fluently than he speaks English but from what I understood the conversation they went back and forth a lot between "this is what the Bible says" and "this is what the Koran says." After the conversation died down and Gina and Jason had moved on to sharing and talking with his girlfriend and employees, I started talking with him more about Bollywood. It was very touching because he took out his CD case and found a soundtrack to multiple Shahrkuh Khan movies and he gave it to me as a gift. I was very thankful that he was willing to give it to me. He had an employee that was from Nepal and he kept asking me to list the Bollywood movies I had seen and at one point he asked me to start singing the songs that I remembered. It was amazing how bonding Bollywood can be. Iftikar and his employees all asked me for my e-mail and it was also very touching because Iftikar said that if Shahrukh Khan ever comes back to Barcelona (HE WAS THERE IN JANUARY THIS YEAR!!) then he would get an autograph and a picture for me and send it to me.

After lunch we went out sharing again for a couple more hours. We had two longer conversations with a couple groups of girls. One couple we approached in the park was in the middle of either breaking up or the guy was trying to tell the girl he was with that he liked her and so we felt pretty embarrassed about interrupting them but luckily we were able to leave them with tracts. I think as Christians though we would agree the Gospel and eternity was much more important than whatever conversation they were having :) Our day was cut short a bit because Jason, Dayna, and Heather went to meet and have dinner with Sergi again and we came right back to the hostel.