When I started walking in from the parking lot this morning, I noticed the Gideons were passing out copies of the New Testament. I tense up when I see them, not because I don’t want a Bible, but because I know that undoubtedly there will be some student in one of my classes fuming about the “Jesus freaks” harassing them.
I park in the “A Building” parking lot because there are usually spaces there, and because I come out of my last class each day from there, so I have a short walk to my car and beat everyone back out of the parking lot. The side effect of this is that on Mondays and Wednesdays, I have to walk down the front length of campus to the Forman Center. To give you an idea of what that entails when you park at the “A Building,” until last year the Forman Center was called the “E Building.” I actually like the walk (or I’d park in the FC lot), but on Gideon days it means that as I stroll along in front of all five buildings, I have to walk past every single Bible-bearer at each door and every sidewalk corner.
Again, I don’t mind that in and of itself; but it means telling every one of them that I have a copy already, and I always feel bad doing that because I worry that they are thinking I’m lying because I’m an atheist and I just don’t want a copy. Yes, I know how exactly how ridiculous a thing that is to worry about and there are several solutions, ranging from 1) carrying the copy I keep in my car with me so they can see it to 2) taking a few extra seconds on my walk to class to actually be more sociable and talk to them instead of breezing past and trying to make it on time to a class with an ADD professor who talks about the weekend’s football games for the first 10 minutes anyway.
I got past Gideons #1 and #2 without having to speak to them (and I’m proud of that accomplishment in a way that scares me as I note the similarity of that statement to those of a certain antisocial family member of mine). Gideon #3 caught my eye at the sidewalk between “B” and “C” and asked if I’d like a copy of God’s Word. I smiled, thanked him, and said that I had one already, all as I kept my pace, intent on quickly finishing my trek past two more buildings. He nodded and said “Okay,” and I thought “Darn, he thinks I’m an atheist,” all the rest of the way to FC222.
But a few paces down from him, a girl a little older than me passed me on the sidewalk as she headed the other way towards A or the A Extension or the parking lot. She said “Don’t you hate it when they do that?” with something between a knowing smile directed at me and a sneer directed at the nice guy with Bibles that she obviously felt she’d soon have to “endure.”
It made me think. I mean, if I’d been as vocal a person as I’d like to be I would have told her that I think they do a real service and that she had a bad attitude. But you know what, so did I. Here I was actually almost agreeing with her in the sense that I have kind of hated “Gideon days” because I worry about ridiculous things that I imagine the guys thinking about me. I tense up when I see them because, invariably, somebody freaks out about being hounded by the guys, probably only because they expect to be hounded by the guys and get defensive as soon as they see them, reading implications into “Would you like a copy of the New Testament?” and imagining thoughts in the Gideons’ heads the same way I do, whether for different reasons or not.
I also wish I had had long enough to think this through to take my second opportunity of the day when one of the girls came into my Spanish class and (as predicted) dropped into her chair breathless, having actually run away from one of the guys and telling him she was late for class. (It was 9:52. Who’s going to buy that anyway?) Unfortunately, I was already right on thinking about the preterite tense of verbs in Spanish.
Once again, I needed the Evangelism Linebacker today.
