Scattered Thoughts

Some more pics for your viewing pleasure (the dates are wrong)

The huge word on top of the cross is the chinese character for "Love". I thought it was really cool how in the centre of the character contains another character, "Heart"- in this case, it is in red while the rest of the strokes protects it in golden yellow.

It's been well over 2 weeks since I've been back yet I still don't feel it's been enough time to "digest" what happend. It was really difficult and challenging. Many situations occured that was beyond my realm of expectations...and those that I did expect did not come close to occuring. I am suppose to share about my trip tomorrow and i sit here with scattered thoughts. I almost feel guilty that no one was converted due to all the amazing stories i hear about china from previous trips.

Here are some of those thoughts:
- by the second half of the trip, when we got the hang of how things worked around the school and with the students, we realized that we need to go the subtle route. Since we could not share about anything, we busted out the theme song, 1 Cor13, which was in Chinese. Almost each morning, we sang that song and by the end of the 3 weeks, the students had memorized it and were eager to sing it. Meanwhile during our conversation times, we no longer talked about 'how to give directions in English'. We talked about our parents- what we admired about them; what are burdens were- we talked about life and we tried to show love. If in the future anything (i.e. fruits) shall arise due to our service there, then we evangelized.

- Throughout our 3 weeks, God used the long term foreign teacher (let's call her Linda) tremendously to bless us. From buying us fruit (to keep us regular) to hooking us with her cell to call home, she was amazing. Even though she is only in her early 30's and is a single woman, she has enough courage to go on Spiritual Fearfactor. Although she is soft spoken, her love and faith screams volumes that resonates for quite some distance. With her broken mandarin, she leads bible studies from the youth to the adult fellowships. And despite all the discrimination and opposition that she faces, she always had a beautiful smile. I was gretly encouraged in those few weeks.

Watching Linda reminded me of some words a retreat speaker shared with me earlier this summer. He tried to convince me that no matter how unprepared i felt, i was more prepared than 3 years ago...when i had alot of 'passion' or 'burden' for China. No matter what you call it, they are emotions. We need to learn to separate the emotions from reality. This is when it all clicked, i'm sure Linda does not like being treated like a second class citizen anymore than i do. Yet she still remains faithful and committed to the lives that she has been entrusted with.
No matter how she felt, she knew what she had to do.
No matter how i feel, i need to remember that there are those who still don't know.
No matter how we feel, we are called to be bearers of the Gospel.

At this point, she is the only long term worker in that city (from this organization at least). Keep her in your 'conversations' & do converse with Daddy about a trip to the far east =)

I think i have an idea as to what to share now.