Our team was exploring the Forbidden City of Beijing. It’s a place where the emperor’s lived. And it was awesome. It was so extravagant. All the gold and blue and green paint on the columns, the carved animals and dragons on the roof, the chiseled wooden flowers on the walls, it was beautiful.
We would walk through one set of doors and it would open to another open courtyard, and another set of doors and another and another.
Then finally, we got to the end, and I look up to see one last building that was high on a hill. We were told that you climb to the top and you can see over the city of Beijing. So of course, we wanted to see this one last part of the Forbidden City.
It was a steep climb up some stairs through a garden and once we got to the top, the view of the city was beautiful.
Kevin, a worker at our ministry site, told me that the center of Beijing is at this point. I thought that was pretty cool, you know, to have a building set on a hill that marks the center of the city. But once I walked to the very top to look inside, I saw a giant golden Buddha with incense and people bowing their heads to him. I realized that this wasn’t just a building at the center of Beijing; it was a temple for Buddha.
In that moment, I felt so much spiritual darkness. I felt the spiritual confusion that the enemy has deposited. This was my first time to enter a Buddhist temple; a manmade god. For what felt like forever, it’s like I blanked out and couldn’t move and couldn’t see. Once I gathered my thoughts and got back to reality, I immediately went and found my teammate, Sarah-Kate.
I went up to her and told her what I felt. She looked back at me and said, “Maybe that’s why I have no desire to go up there, I felt something kind of like that too.” She said she could tell through my sunglasses that I was distraught. She said she was going to do a quick prayer walk around the circle of the temple so I said I was going to do one too.
While I was praying, I started to think about what would happen if God were to be at the center of Beijing. I prayed that one day He would make Himself known to the nation of China and that people would be drawn to Him. I prayed that the Truth would overcome the confusion that has made it’s place in China. I prayed that God wouldn’t just be AT the center of Beijing, but BE the center of Beijing.
God is so much greater than the confusion and the idols and the manmade temples. Buddha may be elevated by human hands, but God is elevated because He is the one that created the hands to worship.
#AlexsAsianInvasion
