By Daniel Meszaros
I remember one of the first times I went to Robson Street with DRIME Vancouver. It was in late August 2011. It was a warm evening with lots of people enjoying perhaps one of the last summer evenings downtown. Because I was new and just coming to ‘feel things out,’ I didn’t perform in any of the DRIME dramas. I was there just to mingle with the passers-by and to observe God work through our team. The beginning of the evening was totally nerve-wracking. It’s hard to muster up enough courage to start what feels like random conversations with random strangers. I really wanted to make the most of this opportunity, so I started a few conversations with people who had stopped to watch the dramas.
After I chatted with a couple people and started to get the hang of things God brought my attention to a particular young man. As I began to talk with Isaac, I found out that he was a 21 year-old student from Saudi Arabia studying English in Vancouver. He was brought up Muslim and tried to stay true to his Islamic practices as much as he remembered during his stay in Vancouver. He was really interested in the dramas because he had never seen anything like it before. I explained to him that we were a Christian group of students and guided him to figure out what the dramas were actually about. He seemed to believe that Islam and Christianity were “basically the same thing,” which was a great chance to take the conversation even further.
We had a fantastic conversation about God’s grace and how in Christianity it’s not what we do that saves us but what Christ did for us. This concept was hard for him grasp. We ended up talking for a long time. It was fantastic because it was just a conversation of curiosity. I would ask him about his religion and then he would ask me about mine. After a while, he told me that he had to go but he really wanted to get together again to continue talking, so we exchanged contact information. He told me that he will hopefully be coming out to the streets again. What was so cool was that a couple of days before I had gone to a Bible study where we talked about the differences between Christianity and other World Religions, including Islam. It was so God-planned that I even knew anything about what Isaac believed, which helped me and gave me confidence in my conversation with him. God is so good, and I am so grateful that he prepared me in advance for this conversation. I look forward to continue talking with Issac, and am praying that one day he will come to a greater understanding of the God who loves him.
Daniel is currently serving as a member on the Vancouver ministry team. This is his first year in DRIME.
