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The past month, I have been in mainland China and, in
order to keep our contacts safe, I have been unable to blog. It has been an
amazing month and I will attempt to address some of the biggest lessons I
learned while there in my next few blogs.
My prayer for going into mainland China was from Daniel 2:20-23:
Praise be to the name
of God forever and ever; wisdom and power are His.
He changes times and
seasons; He sets up kings and deposes them.
He gives wisdom to
the wise and knowledge to the discerning.
He reveals deep and
hidden things; He knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with Him.
I thank and praise
you, O God of my fathers:
You have given me
wisdom and power; You have made known to me what we asked of you.
Before heading into China, my team was informed that we
would be working at a university with students majoring in English by spending
time speaking with them to help them use their English skills. If the
opportunity presented itself, we could make appointments with them to hang out
outside of school. The fundamentals were tricky. We could not openly share about
Jesus with the students on the campus. We would have to be careful of those
students who could be class monitors and thus report to higher authority those
students who could be believers. We had to watch out for people who could be
following us that would report our activities. We also had to be mindful of
teachers who could catch wind of our mission to share the Gospel with students.
Basically, the time in China
would feel like a James Bond movie plot and the only way to navigate the
uncertainties of talking to people was to tune into God, asking for His wisdom
and discernment.
To be honest, I was excited about the idea of being undercover. However, fifteen minutes inside the borders
of mainland China (not even close to our actual site), where people stared,
took pictures, and laughed at us, and I had to immediately speak in code (not
saying things like “Jesus”, “prayer”, “Bible”, “church”, “Christian”, etc.), I
was ready to make a run for the nearest airplane home. My heart was hard and I
was uncomfortable. Who cares that God had a plan for me to be there? All that
mattered was my well-being.
What I found after living in the community around the
university, getting to know students, and asking God to have His way was that
God had better plans and He was showing me how good life could be when I laid down my rights to having things
my way. Namely, when I surrendered, I started to really care about China
and its people. I saw how God has His hand in this nation and cares deeply
about the people who are persecuted and isolated for their faith in Him.
Moreover, it was a startling reality to see how people live every day without
rights, while I struggled to live without my rights for two weeks. It was quite
the hands-on lesson of learning humility!
