I called, You answered

When I last left off, we were hoteled away for the night in Panama City, compliments of Delta Airlines. As a group we had prayed for God to show us His will and were trusting Him to have good works prepared for us to do during our stay.

We were right.

Last night I wrote about the pastor from Iowa we met (Jason). He ended up sharing a room with Wes last night and hanging out with us today. At 1:00PM today, i.e., an hour before we initially planned on leaving Panama City, we found out that our flight had been further pushed back and we would be spending all day in Panama City. We just had dinner and will leave the hotel in about an hour.

Anyway, Jason saw a lot of people gathering at this convention center across the street from our hotel and suggested we go over to witness. It ended up being an Anime Convention. So we all marched ourselves outside, braving extreme humidity for one block, and ended up inside the convention. **Side note about the humidity: it is SO humid here that as soon as I took my camera out of the case it began taking blurry pictures immediately because there was so much moisture .**

The first group we ran into inside was actually a church group down in Panama City that specifically reaches out to teens and young adults. The young people of Panama are in desperate need of a Savior, feeling deserted and abandoned by their parents, government, and society in general. The sentiment I received from talking with the people at this convention was one of apathy. Nothing is of any significance. Life is simply to be lived and evaluated at its end. Existentialism truly robs us of the joy that comes with knowing our lives our lived according to God's purpose.

We prayed with Bryan (or is it Brennan) from the church group and then went out to talk with people. Some of the girls had the opportunity to talk to a group of Jehovah's Witnesses and share the truth of Jesus Christ with them. We had a lot of people asking what our shirts were about. Micah, Jordan, and I were asked if we wanted to be put in a lottery to win 20 Anime DVD's. We politely declined.

After this, Jessica and Priscilla were able to talk to a guy and Jordan, Micah, and I talked to his friend. The girls were able to share the Gospel and lead that guy (I don't know his name right now, will update for sure) to the Lord, and the guys and I were able to (with me functioning as a quasi-translator) visit with Allisandro for quite a while and share the Gospel with him. He claims to be Agnostic and has an incredible amount of "knowledge" about Christianity. He was raised a Catholic, and understands that our sin condemns us to Hell and that Jesus Christ died so that our sins could be forgiven. However, he said he just does not have the faith to believe and accept.

It is so sad that many people are sent to Hell due to the distance between their heart and mind. Still, we were able to pray with Allisandro and gave him information about the church group we met. May God continue to work in His life and draw him to Himself.

All in all, God is doing amazing things already. The theme for the trip is, "Salvation is here!", taken from the Hillsong United song by the same name. One of the lines says, "Salvation is here and He lives in me." Jesus Christ lives in each and every one of us that has a personal relationship with Him, and wherever we go we take Him and His salvation there too. May we continue to be reminded of this.

If you could please lift up the following requests in prayer we would greatly appreciate it:

• safety while finishing our travels
• our friends at Generacion sin Limitas, the church group, that they would be encouraged to continue in the ministry God is doing in the youth of Panama
  
• all of our new friends from Panama who need a personal relationship with Christ, that believers would hear the call and take the Gospel to them and that they would be ready to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord
• that our team would continue to have servants hearts and be ready for whatever God leads us to do this week
  

All glory to Christ,

Justin