Last Full Week

This is my last full week in Germany.  I'm excited and kind of sad.  I miss my friends and family and AC.  I'm not homesick but I miss seeing everyone but I felt the same way when I moved to Pittsburgh.  Today was pretty good.  Patrick and I went out together.  He was kind of drained and tired, but we kept going.  We talked with this couple of five or ten minutes but they didn't really want to talk much and weren't interested in learning about God.  Maybe it just wasn't their time.  After that we went back and prayed for 10 minutes or so before deciding to do solarium.  It went really well.  I haven't done solarium here and Patrick has never used it, so I thought it might be a nice change of pace for us.  The first girl we talked with was a pantheist and we didn't really get to share with her but she was our first so it was a good learning experience.  She is also the first pantheist I've met here.  Then these two people came up and asked what we were doing, so we told them and they said they wanted to be a part of this.  The girl was an agnostic from Hungary and the guy was some what spiritual from Germany but he left before we could ask him about his beliefs.  After the girl finished solarium, she asked us why we were doing this and we told her why and that we believed in God and shared a little bit of our faith but she didn't seem like she wanted to learn more.  

We decided to pack up and try our normal method for the last 45 minutes.  We talked with this guy who grew up in the church and stopped believing in God after he was confirmed but still thought there was a higher power.  He thought that God wouldn't be able to have a relationship with all of the people.  We explained to him that since God was all-powerful that He could do that.  Then he thought that maybe God would favor the person who sinned less or had less big sins, like lying over murder.  We explained to him that God didn't differentiate between sin and that He would always love us like a father loves his children.  The more we talked with him, the more he started to think and start to agree with what we were saying about God.  Unfortunately, we had to leave as things were starting to get really good but we got his email.  Hopefully we'll meet up with him before we leave and continue sharing.  It was just an awesome way for God to show up and refresh Patrick who was tired and drained; feeling like he wasn't making a difference for God.

Kenny and Patrick met a very interesting group of people today.  There is a group of "Christians" who are going around talking to people and teaching that the way to salvation is through works and not grace.  I understand that many people do see that passage in James as saying that we need to do works or else our faith is dead, but they teach that God merits us salvation based on how well we perform.  They also believe that there is God the Father and a God Mother.  They cite Revelation 21, where the Bride comes down, but they refused to tell Kenny more about this God Mother unless he agreed that he would follow their teachings and spread what they believed.  He said it was a very strange experience.