Coy and I were at Blockbuster video last week when we ran into the most random person (since then we’ve signed up for Netlix). This guy with a sort of out-of-breath, high pitched, urgent, Russian accented voice approached us with some windchimes. Yes, windchimes. “Hi my name is _______ (sorry couldn’t make out the name) and I’m from the universalist chruch. I’m selling windchimes….then he lost me because it was about that time when I noticed that Kirra, our 17 month old daughter, had something gooey dripping out of her diaper. Yuck! I left Coy with the Russian windchime man, grabbed Kirra as gently as I could, and headed for the car. I cleaned her up really well with wipes and was sort of proud of myself for being able to avoid a potential public mess. Then I realized that there were no clean diapers in our bag. Nice. Coy was still inside and I needed to tell him to speed it up because we had a ticking time bomb on our hands. So, I cover little Kirra up as best as possible with her summer dress and head inside. I feel somewhat ashamed walking into a very public, very well lit and well mirrored place with baby bottom on my hip. I found Coy around the room from where we had left him and the windchimes had followed. I gave Coy “the look” and he excused himself to take Kirra while I checked out the movie.
We drove home sort of dazed and confused. Me, I was thinking, did that really happen. Coy was thinking, what ever happened to getting to know someone before trying to sell them windchimes?!
On a more serious note–we do wonder why the man didn’t just ask us to give him some money for a worthy project, to feed someone in need, or give money for a need he may have had himself. We are Christians, and we are sensitive to the needs of others.
What is wrong with the snapshot of evangelism we got that night? And why couldn’t two pastors, my husband and myself, figure out what this man really needed? Maybe because we didn’t know him from the next guy. Maybe because we were distracted by the windchimes? Maybe because we had a real life diaper situation during the pitch?
I’m not sure but what we did conclude is that we can probably come off just as creepy as this guy when we invite people to church, tell them about Jesus, or talk “Christian-ese” to people we haven’t gotten to know yet.
As we were driving across the grocery store parking lot–we see Russian windchime man approaching his next victim…
