It’s exciting to meet Vietnamese students on campus because I can usually easily connect with them. Also, I feel like Vietnamese students are sometimes overlooked and not reached by Christian ministries.
I met Annie outside Starbucks on UTSA’s campus. She filled out one of our surveys earlier that week and said she’s interested in knowing God more personally.
I asked her while she drank her coffee where she’s from, what she thinks about UTSA, about her family, and about her spiritual background. After Annie told me that she grew up attending a Catholic Vietnamese church with her family, stereotypes of the Vietnamese Catholic church started rushing into my head. I thought, Annie probably knows every tradition of the Catholic Church and may think that this is what it means to be a Christian.
“So how do you want to grow this year in your faith?” I asked. Annie said, “I want to grow closer to God and know more about God because I teach in the children’s ministry at my church back home. So if I grow stronger in my faith here, I can bring it back home to the children of my church.”
From here, with praises to God for already working on Annie’s heart, I told Annie about Epic and why it exists. I then asked her, “If you were to die today, how sure are you that you will spend eternity with God?” She wasn’t sure how to answer the question, so I shared the gospel with Annie and spent extra time talking about John 1:12 “Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.”
Annie came to our Epic meeting that night and ended up in my bible study small group. She demonstrated again how eager she was to know more about Jesus. She continues to attend Epic’s weekly meeting.
God is at work in Annie’s life. Praise Jesus for this, and pray that she continues to grow so that she can share her love for the Lord with the children at her home church and at UTSA. Praise Jesus for also proving that my stereotypes of Vietnamese Catholic churches can be wrong.
austin esm 