So I’m in the grocery store, just getting my brain settled on what I need in the produce section, and some guy comes up to me and goes, “Do I know you? You look familiar to me.” I actually get that a lot for some reason.
I was like, “I don’t know. My husband and I evangelize in downtown Greenville, so maybe you recognize me from that.” I’m sure he didn’t expect that answer lol. But at this point I’ve been doing it for so long, I don’t even blink at getting a strange look. Though afterwards my husband pointed out it could’ve been that he saw me in the store before, since I shop there all the time, lol.
So then we kept running into each other going through the aisles and randomly chatting. It was awkward but turned fruitful at one point when he made some comment about, “Why can’t all religions be the same? Why does there have to be so much division?”
I kinda gave a general “major on the majors and minor on the minors” answer, and got in a two-second gospel when defining that majors worth fighting over were the triune God (how he presents himself biblically) and being saved by grace alone through faith alone. Unfortunately I fell behind him in the aisle progression through the store, because I had to go back and find some seeds which I didn’t buy anyway. I also ended up forgetting a few things, lol, but I think I did pretty well for my mind being in grocery and evangelism mode at the same time. Plus I still seem to have baby brain (does this ever go away?). So this was no easy mental feat by any stretch.
All I can say is always be prepared to give an answer (1 Pet. 3:15), even with a divided brain in a grocery store.
Yet by God’s providence (I’m a slow, OCD shopper as indicated above) I caught up with him again on the other side of the store and said, “I thought of something else in response to your question.” I asked him to think about something he had a lot of knowledge about. Then to imagine he chatted with someone who said they knew a lot about x subject, but he could tell they had no idea what they were talking about. This was to basically make a loose point that there is legit and non-legit knowledge/truth in any given subject, including religion. Probably not the best analogy being that God is the starting point for truth, not man, but it was what popped in my mind on the fly.
If I remember correctly, he mentioned something about angels as well because I said, “Plus Satan wants to deceive the world with false religions. That’s why we have God’s Word to help us sort out these things (Heb. 4, Acts 17), rightly interpreted of course (2 Pet. 1).” In response, I quoted/summarized Galatians 1:8: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed,” (ESV).
I continued, “Where do some founders of religions like Mormons (Joseph Smith), and Seventh-Day Adventists (Ellen G. White), etc, say they got revelation from? An angel or even god himself.” It’s interesting that these guys along with Jehovah’s Witnesses sprung up around the same time period (mid-to-late 1800s/early 1900s) with similar justifications: all current churches have gone astray, therefore god/some angel has commissioned [insert founder] to purify them all by starting a new one with new revelation that supersedes the Bible. I guess Satan doesn’t have to get too creative with his lies, as he’s been using the same ones since the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2).
My aisle companion was like, “Good point,” and probably thinking, “I should’ve kept my mouth shut in the produce section,”. Hey, you gonna make a claim about God/Christianity/religion, I ain’t letting you get away with it if it’s false. That was the end of our convo, and I didn’t see him again as I zig-zagged back to the freezer section in the middle of the store before I went to checkout. All I can say is always be prepared to give an answer (1 Pet. 3:15), even with a divided brain in a grocery store …. 🐘
*Photo by Pixabay from Pexels
wassuppresup.org 
Leave a Reply