Beirut - Day 3

As usual, we started the day with breakfast and a team meeting in which we shared our experience from the previous day, our 20/20, and did planning for the current day. The first thing we did is some set up for the Fun Fair. I was primarily set up the booths the games would be run in and hanging up the signs behind them.



Then we headed out onto the streets again to deliver flyers, and talk with the locals. The first team I was on (myself and two interpreters who were brothers) distributed a lot of flyers, but didn't talk to very many people. They tended to move real fast and it was hard for me to tell how willing the people we were running across were to interact other than accepting the flyer. We ran out of the flyers we initially started with, then returned to the church to get more, and headed out again. When we ran out of those, one of the brothers needed to leave to do something else, so the one brother and I headed back to the church. On the was we ran into another one of our teams praying over a man in a wheelchair and his mother. I cut my interpreter loose and stayed with that team and we wandered back to the church passing out flyers and actually talking to people.

After lunch I decided to stay in and rest again as I still wasn't feeling all that well (though better than yesterday). Primarily, I was exhausted from walking through the streets and wanted to conserve energy for the Fun Fair that night. The rest of the team went out in vehicles to distribute flyers a bit further out from the church.

That night was the first night of the Fun Faire started. There was a good turnout (apparently it was pretty light on the first night when they did it for the first time last year). It started at about 6PM. From about the time it started until I started getting ready for my program at about 8:30 I worked in a booth where kids tried to put out candles by spraying water at them from large syringes.

At a bit after 9 Katie (Pastor Kelly's daughter) and I did our presentation. I asked the kids what was going on in London right then, and was stunned to find out they didn't know anything about the Olympics. After I explained what that was, I told them we were going to have a mini-Olympics of our own, and then Katie and I picked out 4 boys and 4 girls to run a small relay race (boys against girls). I had run across the street a bit earlier that night with another team member (David) and picked up some candies to hand out as prizes for the race. The boys won the race, and we gave them some large candies for first prize. The girls got a bit smaller candies for second prize.

I then red to them 1 Cor 9:24, in which the Olympics are alluded to and which talks about the importance of striving for what Jesus has for us:

24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. 25 Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. 26 So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. 27 But I discipline my body and keep it under control,


I went on to say that they way we strive for that is to make sure that we have Jesus first in our lives, and did an illusion that demonstrated the point. I followed that with an illustration using magnets about how sin seperates us from Jesus, but Jesus can cleanse of us of that sin so we can have a relationship with him.

I then talked about the difference between knowing about Jesus and having a relationship with him. I tried to use Koby Bryant as an example of somebody they might know of, but not have a relationship with. I ended up having to use the Lakers in general, they didn't seem to recognize particular players.

Finally, I asked the kids if they wanted to have Jesus clean sin from their lives so they could come to have a relationship with him. In addition to the 25+ kids who raised their hands, I also noticed some adults in the background that had their hands raised as well. (For the record, I don't speak Arabic, so I had a translator with me translating all of this as I went). We had then pray to recieve forgiveness of their sins and acceptance of Jesus.

After that was a skit put on by a couple of the leaders of the Arabic church. As it wasn't translated into English, I'm not sure what was going on, but the kids loved it.