What a week! After spending several days arguing my way through red tape, paper work, and lineups full of angry frustrated people, I got an application together for a new passport only to be told it would take 15 working days to get it. Which means I’m an illegal alien for nearly 3 weeks, possibly at the cost of $100 a day in over-stay charges. I think it will all turn out after some more well placed arguments and my usual dose of stubbornness, but be sure to be putting that in Dad’s ear for me.
In other news, I’ve been finding more opportunities to speak with a couple of ‘house shepherds’ in the area about encouraging and lifting each other up in a regular face to face manner that would help eliminate some of the denominational separation I’ve been seeing here. I don’t know why I had this idea put on my heart so late in my time here, but now is when it happened and so I’m doing all I can to get this rolling. So far, people have been excited about the idea. I just hope they don’t crumble when the hard parts get here. The other idea that seems to keep coming up in conversation is the idea of youth groups. Chinese culture, and a lot of Asian culture, is built up around individual achievement and study. The family unit is given a lot more importance than what we give it in North America, but community outside of the family is a foreign concept in many ways. Extra curricular activities are individual based activities, not team or group based, and trying to explain organized sports leagues took quite a bit. But there’s a need amongst the youth here for peer groups, I can see it in their interactions with each other. Chinese society is as plagued by the ‘Fatherless Generation’ as we are in the West, though it’s roots are different, and young men here especially have no idea what it means to be men, to take part in life rather than wait on an answer from a text book or mom. I’ve seen youth groups be extremely effective in raising up these types of youth, allowing for community to show them who they are and accept them for it. I just don’t know what to do about it in only 3 weeks (yes, that’s all the time I have left here).
So I need you to do what you all do best and ask that these needs be provided for. And if I’m to be part of it that I would know what to do, say, or be, and who to do, say, or be it to. I want to finish well here, and not get distracted with getting bills paid or renewing visas or whatever else there is to distract me (and there is plenty to be distracted by).
