Someone was high on something other than drugs in Atlantic City

Great day yesterday.

Had a chance to meet with a pastor in South Jersey in the morning. It looks like I’ll be visiting their church to do some evangelism training and help them set up an evangelism team in the spring. I’ll refrain from names and dates till everything’s set in stone, but very exciting stuff.

Afterwards headed down to the Atlantic City boardwalk to hand out about 200 tracts with my friend Chris.

It was a very warm and sunny day for the first week of October, and we had many great interactions, including one with three Boardwalk Ambassadors in hi-viz vests. While Chris spoke with them, I noticed a man leaning against a nearby railing, watching us. His name was Bill, and I made sure he got a tract, too.

After Bill read the tract, I asked him if he had any questions. All he wanted to talk about was Christians’ views on homosexuality (a topic I never brought up). In an effort to see if he thought right and wrong existed outside of us, I asked him who he thought the most evil man of the last 100 years was. Most people will default to Hitler when I ask them this question, and I use their answer to illustrate that what Hitler did was wrong intrinsically, not just because some of us didn’t like it.

Bill threw me a curve ball when he answered Donald Trump. I asked him if he really thought Donald Trump was more evil than Adolf Hitler. He said, “He’s on his way.” After that, all Bill wanted to talk about was Trump.

Earlier in the day, we had given a tract to a woman who laughed and said, “Why you gotta give this to me while I’m high?!” There are a lot of drunk and stoned people on the AC boardwalk. Bill was lucid, yet his mind was just as clouded by the things of this world as any of those inebriated people. I would say he was high on the drug of politics.

I am usually pretty good at extricating myself from circular conversations like this, but Chris ultimately had to swing by and tell me we had to go so I could get out of this one. I managed to fit the gospel in very briefly at the end, but it was tough, because Bill just couldn’t get off how evil Trump was.

I don’t really care what people think of Trump as a man or a politician. I’m not roaming these streets to talk politics with these people. I’m there to share the gospel. I just think it’s sad when someone lets politics cloud their mind like this. Someday we’re all going to be dead and it won’t matter who was president. But it will matter how we responded to Christ.

(“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” - 2 Corinthians 4:17-18)

As we walked away, Chris actually said it seemed like Bill had taken the wind out of my sails a bit. It’s true. I call conversations like this “energy reducers” because it takes a little while to return to baseline.

Fortunately our best moment of the day occurred not long after that. As we were headed back towards Caesars, which was where we had entered the boardwalk, Chris offered a tract to a woman named Tajuana. Tajuana then agreed to talk to me on camera, and we ended up recording a great 25-minute conversation for the YouTube channel, which I will share next week.

We also had opportunities to witness in a bike shop; share tracts with tram drivers and passengers; and share the gospel with two ladies from Brooklyn sitting on a bench. Finally, Chris gave one of our cell phone tracts to a young man in a Yankee hat who seemed to immediately start taking pictures of it. It turned out he had an app on his phone that helped him see better. He thanked us for the tract and said he loved what we were doing.

-JDM-