Theological Banter.

This is my first serious-ish post so sorry if its a bit weird... I'll go back to pretty pictures next time.

This morning after breakfast and class me and my friend Liana decided to go on a run.  And all of you reading this should know well enough how deeply I despise running yet I still do it on occasion.  So we're both running and feeling pretty good and we just decided to keep going as long as we could basically because we didn't have class for quite a while.

About three miles later we call it quits.  Keep in mind how much I hate running yet for some reason this run was great and I felt like I had to reach this certain stoplight (which happen to be called robots in SA).  Like I was determined.  So once we get there we stop and start walking back.

Pretty early on during our walk back we ran into a very sweet elderly man with two younger women accompanying him.  He says hello and that we looked tired.  We explained that we just had a nice long run and it was also pretty hot out by this point.  He noticed our accents and it started the whole "where are you from, what are you doing here, how long are you staying" conversation.  It was all pretty friendly stuff.

Then he hits us with Jehovah's Witness' things.
Oh shoot.
We politely explain that we are Christians, which apparently is an invite for a thirty minute theological debate midmorning.

Okay so first off, we're like physically exhausted from this run and we're sweating up a storm but this cute little old man gets real intense real fast.
He starts with asking us what our name for God was and about the Lord's Prayer and different little things.  Basically, he was testing our knowledge of our faith and such.
So he whips out his Bible and starts hitting us with all these different passages and verses that apparently back up Jehovah's Witnesses or something.

Probably about ten-ish minutes in he realized he was not about to get two converts out of this talk so instead we debated about our religious differences.

Actually I dont even wanna call it a debate.  He basically attacked us.  The whole time Im like saying this little prayers asking for strength and kept repeating the passage about the shield of righteousness and sword of truth over and over again.

This was my first actual encounter of someone testing my faith so upfront and matter-of-factly.
We were both pretty taken aback by the whole ordeal but we definitely stood our ground.  We kind of turned the tables and started asking about the origins of the religion and about the 144,000 and such.
The older man answered everything by the book.  But when we tried to ask the girls things they were more shy and had a hard time standing up to us.

After about thirty minutes when all of us realized that we were at the point in conversation where neither group was going to back down from their beliefs, we politely split ways.  While leaving, the man asked my friend Liana if she was open-minded enough to take a book.  She said she would and I chimed in and said since we're taking your book will you let me pray for you.
He refused me.
Afterward I decided that that was literally the devil trying to get us while we were down.  We were physically exhausted from this run and unprepared for this type of thing.  This guy had all these pamphlets and the Bible and all this different stuff.  He was prepared to go out and 'witness' to people.  And I just wasnt.  Obviously the big guy upstairs is trying to tell me to have my game face on all the time.

Important little extras:
-seriously, thank God for that cult class second semester senior year at good ol MC, without that I woud not have known a good background of Jehovah's Witnesses
-randomly last semester I had to pick a passage of scripture to memorize and write a paper on.  I happen to chose Matthew 6:5-15 which is the intro to and Lord's Prayer.  This is significant because the Lord's Prayer was one of the first things he asked us about / tested us on. Craaazzzzyyyyy.
-This type of thing could happen any given day in America; yet it happened on the other side of the world where we were expecting such different and other things.
-I think there was a reason I had to finish running to the stoplight; otherwise this debate never would have happened.
-God is good.