We arrived in Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam on November 25 after a 5 hour wait in the airport to get our visas straightened out. Team Ing was in good spirits as we bussed through the city, joking, laughing, and enjoying the sites as we road through the city streets, bright lights shining all around us.
Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, is a large, modern city filled with buildings, shops, restaurants, and seas of people walking and riding mopeds through the streets. To say it’s chaotic is an understatement. The foundation of the city is clearly Vietnamese, as well as its elders. But everything atop that crumbling foundation is striving for westernization. It’s younger generations shun typical dress for short shorts and crop tops. They dye their hair, whiten their skin, and disregard many of the traditions that had once passed from generation to generation.
Along with what some would call advancement comes a whole slew of distractions. There is wifi abound and something new every place you look. With so much to see and so much to do, it’s all too easy for your attention to be pulled in 100 different directions.
My team and I spent our time exploring. We ate Vietnamese food. We walked around downtown. We got a pedicure and a message for $20 total. We went to go see the Hunger Games, and took advantage of many of the amenities Ho Chi Minh had to offer. My team gets along well and we had a lot of fun together. But as I found myself bombarded with so many distractions, I found it was all too easy to put Jesus on the back burner.
I forsook my morning quiet time to get out earlier, spend time exploring and shopping. After coming from the mountains of Nepal where we had no wifi, I allowed my night time prayer and reading time to be consumed with Facebook and Instagram. I had no balance. The wifi got the best of me.
My heart longed to be back in those mountains in quiet serenity. Here, distractions are everywhere, and therein lies the problem. It’s impossible to run from it when it’s where you live. And there will be no escape for me this month, as my ministry site is Da Nang, the fifth largest city in Vietnam.
As part of our adventure my team and I went up to a sky bar to get a look at the skyline at night. It was enough to take your breath away. I was surrounded by beauty, but my heart was in a state of unrest. I confessed to my team that I felt drained and empty. I’d been missing Jesus. I was letting the world affect me instead of affecting the world.
That then leads me to wonder, how am I going to find a balance and put on my spiritual armor when I’m at home and have every social media platform in existence at the touch of a finger? How do I stay away from the devil in the distractions? I believe that’s something the Lord is going to teach me this month. Da Nang is large, westernized, and will have all the distractions of Ho Chi Minh and more. How do you practice abandonment in a place with every amenity you could want?
The answer is self control. So God, I pray for conviction and self control. I want to stay away from Facebook more than I have, because I’ve realized it makes me more judgmental. I don’t want to be judgmental; I want to be like Christ. I want to put God first. He is the reason I live. He is the reason I’m here. He deserves my attention.
Being plucked from the mountains of Nepal and dropped back in the middle of civilization has been a challenge to my faith, but one that I welcome wholeheartedly. I am a carrier of His light, and I want to walk around with that mentality. Let me be an influencer rather than one who is influenced. In order for that to happen, I need to be so filled with the spirit there is no more space to be a consumer of the world.
