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I do <g>. I was telling Dad about my experience and he and I were exchanging stories. First, we both agreed that evangelizing is not our spiritual gift. We're both fine with answering questions or sharing personal experiences but neither of us is comfortable just walking up to someone and asking if they know about Jesus (much less shouting about it from behind a bullhorn). Dad told me about a guy who used to hang around Public Square in Cleveland in the 1970s, when Dad was working downtown and often walking to his different accounts (he was an IBM repairman at the time). The guy would quietly and calmly approach people and ask if they knew they were going to Heaven. Sometimes folks would engage with him; sometimes they'd tell him to leave them alone, and he would. Dad listened to him speak a few times and he always thought the evangelizer was positive and respectful.

(On the other hand, Dad also told me about a young man who would go up to people and tell them he'd just gotten into town and the airline had lost his luggage and now he needed money to buy some essentials. Once, Dad replied "wow, again? This is the third day in a row the airline has lost your luggage--you have terrible luck, my friend!" To which the man replied "Nah, that must've been someone else you talked to before--you know we <n-word>s all look alike to you!". Another time, Dad replied "Beat it...I'M working this side of the street!")

When I was at Kent State in the late 80s, we had a man who would stand near the bus stop at the campus center and "preach". Mostly he liked to tell us how women, according to the Bible, should be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. You can imagine how well that went over on a college campus.

After I returned yesterday, I was thinking about a missions trip some of my church's teens took to a poor area in Appalachia last summer. They went specifically to help some folks with house projects and to help clean up a local park. One day, they were repairing the porch of an elderly lady who was very grateful for the help and kept praising the teens and bringing them lemonade. Her neighbor--an elderly man who was wheelchair bound and was, according to his neighbor, an alcoholic with occasional bouts of drug abuse--kept shouting to our teens about how come nobody ever came over and fixed HIS porch? So at the end of the night, the teens found a local-ish Home Depot and bought more supplies, then they went back the next day and fixed the man's porch. He did NOT, in fact, praise them and bring them lemonade. He mostly cussed them out and told them his low opinion of Christianity. He didn't have some instant conversion to the faith that day but his cussing eventually stopped, and I'd like to think he had a slightly better opinion of Christians by the time the teens left.

Pancakes at ANY time are delicious!