kilometre zero

The physical madness of this week was pushing last week away as we cleaned the streets told testimonies in Madrid gave away coffee in the park and tonight would be dancing and doing dramas in the street, in front of people, people with eyes.

It was a mad week with no routine we had done free windscreen washing in Torrejon centre although its easy to see why early missionaries made mistakes i wondered what the ratio of blessed to scared people had been as we grew in confidence and stormed cars in a bid to clean them before the lights changed.

Some of the others had given their testimony in sol the main plaza in Madrid where every main road came to and where every km in Spain was measured from so hence the name kilometre zero. An evangelistic organisation had taken the name and preached there every week night at 8. It was this very group i had herd the last time we had gone to Madrid amongst the madness of thinking about my dad I had been struck by a girl i had herd preaching but she was different there was no 'your all going to hell talk' you so often here condemning people whether pastors of murderers, there was no 'end i nigh' talk either she had simply talked about the love of god and a relationship with him. It had been the first time i had herd someone talk in the street about Jesus with no cringe factor, was my perspective changing or was it simply refreshing truth?

There were five people who prepared to give their testimony I didn't do it, the idea of face to face evangelism terrified me, the idea of being a the front or middle of a room where people could hear or see me terrified me so how i was about to stand on a big red box in the cities main square was beyond me....maybe one day.

I talked to a couple of people, one guy was from the Philippines and we got chatting he had asked me what i was doing in Spain and i told him a little, i didn't mention my dad, why would i that was private but i felt a strange urge to tell him, like i should and so i told him, as i did so his eyes widened. He had a 3 year old daughter and was terrified the mother was moving to England and he would never see her again. As we talked i reassured him that if he wanted to be a part of her life he wouldn't loose contact, that she was his daughter and somewhere inside she would always have a desire to know her father. I wasn't 'soul winning' as they call it but it was speaking directly into someones worst fear, which was good.