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I got a little time on my hands this morning, since I stayed
home from church with what the Kenyan’s call a runny stomach (diarrhea), so I
figured I would expound a bit on what went down in China…
Chiner (as the locals pronounced it) was a tough month. My
team was alone in northern china as close to Tibet as we were allowed to
go. We went to 5 different cities, one
for only a night in transit, and the other four for anywhere from 3-6 days
depending on how we were received, the opportunities we had to minister there,
and what we felt like the Lord was telling us as a team. We were warned before we got into mainland
that we would be followed almost everywhere we went by the secret police. Sure
enough, immediately after arriving in our first city we got our first two
followers (we called them bogey’s). They travelled on the same buses we were
on, stayed in the same hotels, and pretty much made us paranoid about
everything we did for the first week.
We didn’t leave our hotel much in that city, spending around
20 hours a day in the room, and when we did leave to get food, it was only
three at a time, leaving the other three to watch the stuff on our rooms. This
also happened to be the only hotel we stayed at that didn’t have any showers,
and the toilets were communal squatty potties down the hall and around the
corner. Needless to say this was the hardest part of the month for us. We would
spend three of four hours together in the morning praying, worshiping
(quietly), and reading the word as a team. Then three of us (two ladies and a
guy) would head out to get some food. This was a task in itself since no one
spoke any English, literally none, and we knew about three words in Mandarin.
We had a cheat sheet with some foods on it, so we did okay with the point and
pray method. After we ate our lunch we headed back to the hotel and let the
other group go out. Then we spent the remainder of the day in the hotel room
doing different things, hanging out, more reading, or trying to translate all
the crappy Chinese sitcoms that played constantly on TV.
met a friend on the bus who spoke a little English, and in turn led us to meet
more English speakers. She happened to be a 17 high-school student, and through
her we also got to visit our first school, and of course become the
aforementioned rockstars. In this city we met and became friends with a couple
named Peter and Laura. Laura was an English teacher at a middle school, and
Peter was a Chinese teacher at a different school. Laura spoke very good
English, and Peter’s wasn’t too bad, so with them we actually branched out from
our noodle diet a couple nights, and got to see some cool parts of the city. We
also visited both of their schools, and were paraded in front of class after
class for question and answer sessions, and in front of the entire school one
evening to watch “Son of the Mask” (the awful sequel to the Jim Carrey movie
“Mask” that the students somehow found hilarious).
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room, some man showed up, came in our room, sat on the arm of the chair I was
in (even though there were open spots on the sofa) place his hand on my upper
thigh (this is culturally acceptable between men, weird for me) and started
talking to us as if we were old friends… in broken English of course. He took
us out to lunch, and proceeded to tell Braedon and me how dangerous the city
was, that the people were bad, and that we should be careful. Crap. He left us after
lunch and we never saw him again. We did meet a different man on the bus that
took us around that city, showed us the Buddhist temple, and took us for a day
trip up into some nearby mountains. We didn’t leave our hotel rooms after dark
in this city, and cut our stay short from the intended six days, to three days
because we just didn’t feel safe or that the Lord wanted us there any longer.
Finally we headed back to the main city that we would meet
back up with some other teams before we headed to Beijing for some sightseeing and relaxing. We
were the first team back, so we visited our main contacts, encouraged them as
much as we could, did some much needed laundry, and ate food that we couldn’t
even dream of for the past three weeks. It is amazing how good dairy and cereal
sounds when you have only seen noodles and dumplings for a month.
So in the end the Lord was faithful. I spend more time in
the word than I ever have in my life. The Lord put a hunger in my for the Bible
that I didn’t feel I would ever satisfy while in those hotel rooms. I of course
didn’t understand why He was filling my up so much when I couldn’t do anything
with it, but hindsight is 20/20, and now I am in Africa, and being asked to
preach with 20 minutes notice, give people words of encouragement for the
Bible, etc, and I have a lot of stuff stored up from that time in China. Praise
God.
Hope this wasn’t too long for some of you, and that it at
least started to satisfy others. I love you all, thank you so much for all your
prayers and support! I would not be here if it wasn’t for you. I still have
some money to raise, so if you feel like the Lord is asking you to give, you
can still donate by clicking the link to the left. Thank you again, I know that
the Lord is going to bless each one of you for your continued support as He is
blessing me out here.
love. obedience.
