The Weirdest Conversation I've Had in the Gym

To celebrate the launch Terry Virgo’s new evangelistic resource, Life Tastes Better, we’re sharing a series of surprising evangelistic encounters in everyday situations. This is the first; it’s about our Creative Director, Tim, having a run in with a Sikh in a sauna…

“Where is God?” he said. He spoke to everyone, but to no-one in particular.

“You are a Christian—yes?” He was speaking to a woman sat next to me.

“Yes”, she replied in a thick Eastern European accent. “I am Catholic”.

“Then tell me where does God live?”

There was an awkward silence from the seven or so people sat broiling in the hot box.

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Of all the places you least expect to be plunged into an evangelistic conversation, it’s in a Sauna.

At the gym I use, it’s normally pretty quiet. It’s enough to sweat in silence, the only question running through your mind: “how much longer can I stand the heat?”. It’s also pretty multicultural. Hungarians rub muscular shoulders with Polish, Romanians and Koreans. As a white British male, I’m in the minority. But I love that. It’s a friendly place, but the repeated and insistent questioning from the bearded older man had us all stunned with surprise.

I sat thinking what to answer, knowing that this was a “moment” that I could say something about the hope I have in Christ. Perhaps it was the heat, but I just got confused. Because it is actually a very complex question for a Trinitarian Christian believer to answer. Where actually is God? We know that he is omnipresent—he is everywhere. But when you break it down into the three persons, the answers are a little less clear.

We know Jesus is in heaven, pleading our cause before the Father and praying for us. I can only say that Jesus is in me, because he is in me in the person of his Holy Spirit. And the Spirit is at work everywhere in the world. We see the reality of that as people understand the word of God, respond to it, love one another, and serve Christ. These are the waving trees that show us the wind is blowing.

But where is the Father—in heaven with the Son, or everywhere in the world. I needed a waterproof/heatproof copy of Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology at that moment, but didn’t have one to hand.

“He’s in my heart” chirped the woman beside me.

“God is everywhere and in heaven” responded the man, who I presumed to be a Sikh.

He then stood up and marched out. Leaving us all sat in stunned silence.

We had a short embarrassed conversation about how weird that was. I stumbled over a few words about the difficulty of the question, but was not sure that they were ready to understand the finer points of the trinitarian theology.

I was left with two profound thoughts that I will share with you:

1. Be prepared. Any time, any place, any where. A door will open. Sometimes it will be weird. It won’t be on the subject you want to talk about. It may be scary or confusing. But be prepared to own up to being a believer, and share something — even if it’s your own ignorance of the answer. That’s better than saying nothing.

2. It’s not just Christians who do embarrassing evangelism. I don’t know what he was thinking, or why he said what he did. I assume he felt the burden to talk about faith in God and blurted out his question in the wrong place, in the wrong way, with the wrong crowd. I don’t want to do evangelism like that — but I’ve got to work at ways to raise the subject in natural, friendly and relational ways.

How would you answer that question?

Life Tastes Better is a great book to give away to non-believing friends (or fellow gym goers). It reveals the surprising truth that life with Jesus really does taste better than anything the world can offer us. Read it as a Christian to prepare yourself for evangelistic conversations and have a copy of it ready to give away. Available to buy now.