My very first ride in the back of a cop car and it’s in China! (Odd since my mom works with cops all day/night long.) It was not a very unusual trip, although I don’t know what would be. Four of us crammed in the back seat while Chad sat next to our ‘driver.’ To our surprise we went off roading! I have yet to meet anyone who could dodge the holes and bumps like this man. Between the craziness of the circumstances and the beautiful mountains covered in grass and snow, we were in awe of God’s beauty as the trip went on and on. As we continued to drive with no sign of the monastery we realized that it would take us at least four hours to walk it in the freezing cold in the middle of the night (the original plan was to track bomb at night, and we couldn’t hire a taxi or motorcycles because we hadn’t been able to find anyone else who knew where this temple was). We finally arrived and had to wait for the main gate to open. People were already camping, waiting for a very large festival to take place in a few days. We began to talk and Lesile brought up the idea of leaving our materials during the day since there was no way we’d be back that night. We all agreed that this was the best plan of action.
Once the gates opened we headed into the temple / monastery with our backpacks and purses full of papers to drop along the way. Having a government worker gave us permission to really walk around. The very first building we went into had anywhere from 50 to 100 monks sitting on the floor chanting their prayers. Our ‘tour guide’ (the 12 year old kid) walked us completely around the room – we circled the monks and the room in prayer. Now this is warfare! We went into many different ‘god rooms’ which were full of statues, paintings on the walls of idols, offerings and a monk or two sitting reciting chants. While the other three 007 members (Chad, Lloyd, and Lesile) were leaving little bombs of God’s word everywhere I kept our tour guide busy by asking questions and teaching English.
While the boys were on a hill planting a cross and worshipping Lesile and I were praying our guts out and trying to keep our guide distracted – it appeared that some of the monks had approached our ‘driver’ (the cop) and were showing him one of the Tibetan Bibles a 007 had left. We were really thinking that the ride back to town could be very different than our ride there. When the guys got back we let them know what we saw and we quickly prepared ourselves for what might be ahead.
The ride back was just as smooth as our first ride. We made plans just incase we needed to make a quick getaway. As the day turned to evening we waited to see what would happen as we continued to hope and pray that everything would be ok. After a night of sleep it was time to make our quick getaway – well after we found a taxi that is. But even though we could still end up with the cops coming after us, we still gave out more tracts (probably not the safest idea to give on to your driver – we hoped that he would have waited until he stopped driving to read it, ohwells), and we sang worship songs until we met up with the rest of our friends in another town.
