Two days ago God blessed me to be able to use one of my talents as ministry… I got to play BASKETBALL!!! I was super pumped! Plus, Asian guys aren’t as tall as American guys, so I could actually play with them and even rebound! 🙂 We went to one of the ball courts at a university and just stood around for a bit until they asked us to play. Cabe was with us, so everyone wanted to play with the tall American guy. It’s not really common here for the girls to play, so at first they thought it was funny that I was playing, but as the game went on they kept saying, “You shoot good!” “You basketball very good!” (I’ll be honest… I let it go to my head a bit). We played for about an hour and made friends with all the guys, and told them why we were here. We all exchanged numbers and then we invited them to come to church with us the next day. It’s my new favorite ministry, CRUSH THEM!!! And then invite them to church :). Just kidding… Sort of…
Anyway! Church time came around and we messaged them to see if they were coming. I honestly didn’t expect them to. The university is a bit far from the church, and we just had met them once! But they said all of them were taking a taxi and coming to meet us, and they even brought some friends! I was blown away by how God had used basketball as a tool for us to witness to them so powerfully. One of the strong members of the church actually went to their university! So we connected them and hopefully they will keep coming. We asked them if they thought they would come back, and they said they liked it and would try.
Let me just take a minute and say how amazing it was to be back in a church! By church, I do mean a house where God’s people were meeting, but to actually have a service was so nice! I didn’t realize how much I had missed it until then. It was pretty much like a typical American church service, except I’m in China!!! The gravity of that never left my mind the whole service. We all sang a couple songs with a guitar (the Americans mumbled through some songs), then all the visitors introduced themselves, a guy preached (and someone was nice enough to translate for us!), and then they sang a few more songs and were finished. The visitors were about half of the church and they were almost all invited by racers! So that was pretty cool. Hopefully they will continue to go to church once we have left.
Prayer!
-Thomas (from blog “Harvest in China”) messaged me and said he was going to be baptized this weekend! I sooo hope it’s not our travel day and I can go! But pray for him that he would get really plugged in at the church he’s being baptized at and can continue to grow in his new faith.
-Continue to pray for Duling, I don’t think I’m going to get to see her again before we leave, but I’m trusting that God will finish the work he has started in her!
-We have travel days coming up, so pray for safe travels and for the travel days to go by quickly! 🙂
-Pray for all the basketball guys, that they would keep going to the church and give their lives to Jesus! One of the guys name is Alexander. His English name is the only one I got, but you can have at least one specific name to pray for.
I love you all! I am so thankful for your prayers. I sincerely mean it when I say you are as much a part of this journey as I am from your prayers and financial support!
