When having a conversation with someone about the Gospel there are thousands of ways to transition the conversation from the natural to the spiritual. One that we have found to be effective is to ask people “do you have life assurance?” Most people hear that you said INsurance rather than ASsurance. So it gives a chance to go back and emphasize that you asked about assurance, not insurance.
My friend Todd came up with this idea a number of years ago. We have been using it for a long time. And we have been praying about this tract for a long time to. I think it was about three years ago that we first wrote some notes up on making this into a tract. But, it took a long time to come up with the way to present it that would work. We thought about making it look like an insurance card. That might have been a nice idea. However, then we could not figure out even what that would look like.
Finally we decided on an approach to just compare life insurance with life assurance. We put down some definitions to show the difference. Life insurance benefits the survivors. But, life assurance benefits the dead man!
At long last we had the text and it fit on the card. But the whole card was black and white. That looked pretty boring. So we went back to prayer. Finally, one day I was talking to Todd on the phone about the design of the tract. I suggested that the Life of the Life Insurance and the Assurance of the Life Assurance could be colored red to make them stand out. Then he suggested a drop of blood coming down from the Assurance. When I got home, I changed the tract to a black background and adjusted the colors of the words. I found an image of a drop of blood and put it on the front. That made it look better. Then for the back, a drop of blood splattering. Like so many drops of blood that splattered while Jesus was nailed to and hung on the cross. It made a powerful visual statement. One last review and we knew we were done!
We sent them to be printed and they arrived a few days later. Like we always do, we started using the new tracts right away so that we could get some experience with them. So off to the mall to talk to some people. One woman in the parking lot thought I was trying to sell her insurance. But I said, no, it is much more important than insurance. She took the tract and read it. Inside the mall I made conversation with the woman working at the “dipping dots” kiosk. I started the conversation with her asking if the company offered her benefits including Life Insurance. She said yes. From there I was able to transition the conversation to ask about Life Assurance. She was not 100% assured. But she learned how she can be by the time we walked off.
We have handed out a few thousand of these new tracts by now. The Life Assurance Tract will be shipped in the June 2012 mailing of the Bezeugen Tract Club.
