I did get to see my friend, to say goodbye, two weeks
later. It was a fun surprise to call her
up on the cell phone when she thought I was gone for good. I love how God arranges things like that.
I realized in my last blog that I didn’t talk much about
what we did in China
(though this blog will do little to clarify since the world wide web is… um,
world wide). Actually, China
was a difficult, yet wonderful final country for our last leg of the World
Race. We were told in our briefings that
whatever you have heard about China
is probably true… somewhere in China. China
is HUGE! There are 1.3 billion people
bustling around in this highly monitored country compared to roughly 300
million in the United States. Other staggering statistics, especially for
the Christian community, is that there are still 2.5-3 billion unreached people
left in the world. These are people who
have never seen a Bible; never heard of a man named Jesus or that there is hope
and life beyond being successful in this one.
And the staggering truth is that only 1 out of 10 missionaries are being
sent to these unreached places and less than 1% of Church income goes to these
areas in the world (Romans 10:14).
We entered into China
with this new knowledge rolling around in our heads and the firm counsel to not
associate ourselves as a “Christian” group or even as a group that had been
traveling together for a year. This
would have been much easier at the beginning of the year and we quickly realized
how much our faith is engrained in our vocabulary, actions and relationships
with each other. 
So we practiced and
loosely perfected using our “code” language of abbreviations for potentially
incriminating words, but still found ourselves quickly slapping a hand over our
mouth (or our neighbors) and then promptly trying to act like nothing
happened. It was entertaining in the
nervous laugh kind of way and probably upped our prayer lives a little.
We basically spent our time learning Chinese culture, making
new friends, busing and backpacking into the mountains where minority groups of
Chinese live. The weather was warm,
cold, and sometime really cold. Our
living conditions were nice (think; rundown hotel), remote (empty room w/ a
bed) and rustic (chickens on the other side of single board walls, piles of
grain on the floor, no heat and sharing the small straw bed with Amy). We saw beautiful places and met beautiful
people, learning the culture through stories some would tell, but mostly by watching
the lives of many.
Traveling to Beijing
and walking along the Great Wall was a special end of the month trip before
heading back to Hong Kong for our final debrief and
goodbyes with the people who were part of our lives for the entire year.
