I don't like small talk, at least in many situations. I find myself almost disdaining people as they engage in it. Like, c'mon people, it's obvious that all you're doing is posturing and putting your best--though unsteady--foot forward. It may be a pride issue for me, because it's like I try to detach myself and place myself above the small talkers.

Did I say, at some point in my life, that one thing I liked about engineering is that you don't have to memorize stuff? Then I guess software development is not engineering. Or maybe it's just the teacher.

But whatever the case, I've got a midterm in IE411 that is closed book, closed notes, not even a crib sheet. Just 8 modules of power point slides to do my best and memorize.

I'm borrowing liberally from a speaker I heard this weekend, Todd Langerveld:

There are several ways Christians typically react when faced with evil and lost souls around them.

Sometimes they're pushy. For instance, a group of people came to the heard of the OSU campus last term, waved signs and yelled that pretty much everybody (including Christians who went up to talk to them) were going to hell. One could question if this were even evangelism, but it at least was an attempt. "Pushy" might be the hell-fire-and-brimstone street preachers that are not afraid to get in one's face. This has its good points, because it realizes that the message of the Gospel is urgent and that we must be bold in proclaiming it. However, it has definite weak points too. You're going to turn many people off to your message if you don't respect the people you're trying to reach.

Then there's the other extreme that you could call "passive" evangelism. This is what many tend toward because they're so afraid of being "pushy." But it's probably just as bad. The mindset here is that "hey, we'll just live our lives in a Godly way and hope that people will see the difference and ask about our faith; then we'll tell them." This is what I gravitate toward. The strength in this is that we respect people, we don't force it on them by telling them stuff that they absolutely don't want to hear anyway. But it's weak regarding the urgency of the Gospel.

There is a happy medium, and it's what Mr. Langerveld proposed was the Biblical model. This takes the strengths of both extremes and minimizes their weaknesses.

I forget the passage he took this out of, but it was a Pauline epistle.

By the way, this is extremely exciting stuff to me, because I think it's going to open up places in my life that I've never tread before.

To sum it up:

1. We must pray that God will give us opportunities.
2. We must clearly speak the Gospel, the "mystery of Christ."
3. We must live "with wisdom toward outsiders."
4. We must speak with grace, seasoned with salt.

I asked him after the service about ways to actually initiate conversations with people that you know, and I'm excited about what he said. He likes the direct method. I'd almost given up on the idea that it was a good idea to directly initiate conversations about the Gospel with unbelievers. But I have renewed perspective.

I saw a girl in a little study desk thing in the library. She had a laptop and she was playing minesweeper. Then about 20 or 25 minutes later I went by there again. She was playing minesweeper. Again, or still.