Reflection on Barcelona Experience

At all the meet­ings lead­ing up to Spring Break I was asked what my expec­ta­tions were for the trip, and every time I would reply, “I’m not sure I have any…?” In my mind I put all pos­si­ble expec­ta­tions aside because I knew that ulti­mately God’s will would be done and I had no idea what exactly that entailed besides shar­ing the gospel with the peo­ple of Barcelona.

Well, I was blown away by how great God’s will for the trip actu­ally was. I had no idea how many lives we would affect while being in Barcelona or what effect it would have on my life. The first day we went out shar­ing I had to imme­di­ately step out­side my com­fort zone but it turned out to be amaz­ing. Although I have con­sid­ered myself a Chris­t­ian for some time and have been on numer­ous “mis­sion trips”, I had never shared the gospel with some­one directly before this trip. In the past, the trips mainly con­sisted of help­ing to rebuild or clean-up a church or neigh­bor­hood and/or tak­ing food to the home­less liv­ing in city parks and ask­ing them about their belief in God. How­ever, on the after­noon of the first day in Barcelona, I went out with Alex Gon­za­lez, the pas­tor at the Madrid church and had a “divine appoint­ment,” as Alex would call it, with a young man named Borja. The divine part about this appoint­ment, or rather ran­dom meet­ing, was that Borja was extremely open to talk­ing about reli­gion and also insisted that we speak Eng­lish. I, not know­ing really any Span­ish at all, thanked God for tak­ing down the lan­guage bar­rier and also pro­vid­ing some­one who was just so easy to talk to in general.

After talk­ing with Borja for about an hour about what he believes about God and what he thought other stu­dents in Spain thought about reli­gion as a whole, we began shar­ing the gospel with him and our tes­ti­monies. He said that he believed in Jesus Christ and that He died for our sins and then later prayed to receive Christ as his Sav­ior. After receiv­ing a phone call it was evi­dent that Borja had to leave to meet with some friends so we said good-bye and good luck to Borja. Alex and I walked away try­ing not to make a scene by jump­ing for joy and prais­ing God for such a “divine appointment”.

The time with Borja and just hear­ing about the peo­ple who had prayed to receive Christ that day got me so excited for the rest of the week. The fol­low­ing days were just as excit­ing. Even though I didn’t see any­one else receive Christ per­son­ally, it was just as grat­i­fy­ing and excit­ing to hear about the oth­ers who had. We con­tin­ued to go around the city and talk to any­one close by about their thoughts about reli­gion and shared the gospel with them. We also met up with peo­ple who we had met ear­lier that week, or that groups in the past had met in pre­vi­ous years. Although I loved meet­ing new peo­ple from Barcelona every­day and shar­ing the gospel with them, my favorite part of the trip was meet­ing up with peo­ple we had already met. It was great to build rela­tion­ships with them and get­ting to know them and the cul­ture bet­ter. Although some of them still didn’t believe in God or the Bible after we left them, I def­i­nitely believe that a seed was planted in their hearts and pray that God keeps work­ing in them and the oth­ers that we met in Barcelona over Spring Break.

The trip impacted my life in so many dif­fer­ent ways. I feel way more com­fort­able now shar­ing the gospel with oth­ers now, con­sider myself so much or blessed then I did in the past, to have grown up in a church and around great Chris­t­ian friends, and now truly believe that any­thing is pos­si­ble through Christ.

Amelia