Gospel In Poland
That
the Poles may be more interested than the Czechs in the Gospel became
apparent on the
bus ride to Krakow, Poland. Kristin's seat and mine
turned out to be in the middle of the row right behind the driver that faced the rear of the
bus. The rest of the passengers in the lower level of the bus, which was full,
faced toward us, and because the double-decker bus had low ceilings, sound carried.
Seated facing me two seats to my left was a young Pole who spoke practically fluent English. He took an interest in a couple of Americans and the conversation soon veered toward the Gospel. He identified himself as a Catholic because he was "baptized" as a baby but he didn't know the Gospel, which was presented to him and discussed in a slow, elevated voice, supposedly to be heard above the noise of the engine, for the next two hours, during which the entire bus was mostly silent. Two nuns were seated three rows behind him and the one sitting in the aisle seat kept leaning into the aisle to stare disapprovingly whenever the heresies of Roman Catholicism were being presented, but I pretended to not notice and kept my eyes on the young man.
When Kristin and I handed out in Krakow the Gospel tracts that she had translated into Polish, many Poles stopped to chat. One night, I was crossing the main square of Krakow alone when a young woman approached and asked me if I wanted a girl. Why would I want a girl? "To have sex," she replied. I asked her how, as a woman, she could sell other women? And did she believe in God? She said yes, so was hearing about the seriousness of sin when two burly men approached to see if a prospective customer was giving their sales agent trouble, and were asked if they are Poles. They said yes, so were asked if they love Poland. They said yes again, so were then asked how they could sell their women to foreign men? Did they not have mothers, sisters, wives and daughters? Polish men who love Poland should be protecting Polish women, net selling them. And were they Christians? They said yes, and when the Gospel was then presented, listened with lowered gazes.
One afternoon, Kristin and I were walking by a restaurant's patio when its manager greeted us while wiping down his tables and invited us to come later for dinner. We stopped to chat and the conversation turned to the Gospel, which he and a young man who had been wiping down the tables with him both stopped working and listened to attentively. At the end, the manager nodded his head, look at us and said, "You are good Catholics," which made Kristin and me smile and advise him that we are Christians, not Catholics. That confused him, as in Poland, which is 93% Catholic, Christianity is synonymous with Catholicism. So I asked him if he were a Catholic. He said yes. Had he ever heard in his Catholic church what we had just shared with him? He said no, so was told that what we had just shared is in the Bible, not in Roman Catholicism, and advised him and the young man to read the Bible for themselves, starting with the Gospel of John.