Summer Update August 2011

Hello everyone,

I feel the need to update everyone with what is going on here in Helena and in my life. Tomorrow we will be starting our half week of evangelism. We will be hanging out packets on doors and doing street evangelism in the afternoon/evening. This summer has been very interesting for us here. One of my evangelism partners and friend (Scott Doherty) and his family has gone to Costa Rica to learn Spanish and then on to Peru to be a missionary to Peru for the rest of his life. Please keep him in your prayers.

Throughout this summer I have gone on the streets and see a great need for young people who come along side kids and just talk with them, because the kids can relate to us. After sharing the gospel with them, they have wanted to talk to me about the Bible for at times hours on end. They have never heard such things as this. They do not know the stories of God’s great power. They yearn to hear. When asking how I could contact them, it has been hard to get a response from them, they don’t really want to be contacted. Many of these kids want to give up their drugs and their addictions and follow Christ, but they see it as to hard or that they will do it later.  They yearn for something more in life then what they have. They yearn to be loved by someone.

When I started doing street evangelism this summer Helena was totally open to the gospel. People would take tracts and they would talk to me. As the summer has progressed there has been more and more opposition. There was one man named Job of Ob who had a bunch of his Atheistic followers with him. As I approached them they started shouting at me. A couple climbed up in a tree and started shout profanities and random things at me. Job was absolutely closed to the gospel, so much so that I could not even talk to him. He went through his spiel and then told me to leave. As I left he told me he would rather rot in Hell then to acknowledge that there is a God. I was saddened by this, but the Lord can even break the hardest of hearts.

A week from tomorrow, Monday the 29^th I will be starting my classes at MSU. I have decided to change my major to Construction Engineering Technology. The Lord has worked it out that I have taken most of the classes I needed to take, last semester for this degree. I don’t know what is in store for this year, but I hope and pray for many opportunities to share the gospel with the kids there. I have found that many younger kids that I have known are going to be going to MSU. I would ask you all to keep them in your prayers, that they would stand firm and that I would be able to encourage them and that they would not fall away.  It will be an exciting, but hard year this year. I am ready for it.

This last Friday I gave out tracts at my last day of work. I was amazed at the responses. The people, I thought were absolutely hard against the gospel , were open to it and the one who I thought was a Christian turned out to be a JW. It gets harder and harder to tell Christians from the rest of the world, because many Christians swear. Many are in this world and of this world. Please pray for me as I respond to this JW and also for the rest of the guys in the store that they would come to know Christ as their Savior.

This next summer I will be planning a trip to Nigeria, Lord willing. There is a possibility that I can do an internship over there. Please pray for that. There is no way on my own that I could get over there the Lord will open the doors if it is His will. : )

Please keep all of these things in your prayers. Many things are happening here. The Lord is working in amazing ways. Thank you to you all for your prayers.

Your brother in Christ and Servant of the Lord,

T.J. Kerttula