Remarkable Story
To conclude my account of the month
of March I spent in China I will tell a story about two people I came across
while in the mainland. While in our city, we befriended a guy, we’ll call him
Rambo to protect him, and Rambo was a pretty cool guy. He wore leather jackets,
rocked tattoos all over his body and frequently made humorous comments. One day
after Jeremy and I finished grabbing some spicy noodles (a huge bowl for 5.5
RNB or about $1 USD) we were on our way over to a tattoo shop where Rambo
frequented regularly. Rambo introduced us to his friends over there and two of
my team members, Daniel and Woody, both decided to get a tattoo. Jeremy and I
wanted to support them as they endured the needles so we hopped onto a bus to
go meet them at the shop.
Our novice navigation led us onto
the right bus going in the wrong direction. We laughed while waiting for the
bus to complete its route and begin to backtrack into the right direction.
While waiting we were approached by a girl, let’s call her Scarlet, and Scarlet
seemed to know us very well despite Jeremy and myself having not a clue who she
was. She started asking us how we were doing and what we were up to today. We
soon realized that she knew Rambo and that she knew about us through him. She
was very friendly, almost too friendly, and after some more small talk she
invited us to dinner that night with her friends. Jeremy and I looked at each
other with eye brows raised. I sheepishly replied to the strange friendly
woman, “Umm, yeah, we will talk to Jesse and we will let you know.”
I had been praying, everyone on my
team had been praying, for ‘divine appointments’ to meet with people every
morning before we left our house. After we arrived to the tattoo shop I
realized that I had obviously experienced a divine appointment with Scarlet on the bus earlier that day and that I had no choice but to go to dinner. So that evening Jeremy, Daniel and myself went out to
eat dinner with Scarlet and two of her friends at a restaurant and ate a phenomenal shrimp dish. We got to talking with the two guys, small talk at
first getting to know them. Before we met them, Scarlet told us that both of
these guys were relatively new believers in Jesus Christ and she really
encouraged us to talk to them about God and encourage them in their faith. Soon
enough our conversations sank deeper than surface level questions.
We asked one of the guys, John, how
he came to know Christ and he told us a remarkable story. Scarlet was born in
Korea and while she was in church there two years ago she heard God telling her
that she would take a man named John to Korea. She did not understand what this
meant because she did not know anyone named John. Well, two years passed by and
finally God spoke to Scarlet again about John. She was sitting in a university
classroom and God told her that the guy sitting in front of her was the ‘disciple who Jesus loves’. Scarlet was
confused. God then led her to read a few passages from the Gospel of John in
the New Testament. In that book, John frequently refers to himself as the ‘disciple who Jesus loves.’ Scarlet started a conversation with the guy
and they became very good friends. He had a Chinese name, but as it is common
for Chinese people, he adopted an English name: John courtesy of Scarlet.
Scarlet took John to Korea and they attended a church there. This was the first time John had ever experienced anything like it.
The congregation was made up of a lot of Chinese people and John expressed that
for the first time he felt like he wasn’t alone in his beliefs. I asked the
other guy we were having dinner with if he had ever been to church. He said no,
because he has never had an opportunity to go. That strung a chord so deep
within me that I cannot express how much it hurt to hear. It made me think about how over-saturated
America is with churches. There is nearly one on every block but people choose
not to go out of laziness while this man had never even had an opportunity
to go.
The guys on our teams poured into
Scarlet’s friends day after day. We would go eat meals, explore their
university, play basketball and spend quality time together. We had a bible
study one evening at a coffee shop where we talked to John a lot about holding
on to what he has come to know. He expressed that a lot of his friends laugh at
him for believing in Jesus but he doesn’t care. The Holy Spirit must had been
all over John because there was literally a twinkle in his eye when he said
that. We prayed for him for several minutes and once we were done John told us
that he had seen a vision. He said that he saw himself as a small baby and that
Jeremy, Daniel, Jake and myself were holding him above our heads towards the
heavens.
Can’t make this stuff up. Truth is stranger than fiction.
