Perhaps one of the most difficult things about being a World Racer is setting aside your personal agenda and instead, scribbling into it all of God’s plans for you. And it seems that in this life planner of yours – with it’s indefinite number of pages, within the invisibly gridded day squares and within every partitioned line to match up with every hour that makes up your sad little life, is written in permanent ink: “Trust.”
Easily the second most difficult thing about being a World Racer is travel days. I just spent 16 hours on two planes, 45 minutes being interrogated by airport security, then 18 hours on a bus and prior to that, I spent about eight hours in the Beijing International Hospital and the day after, bedridden – afraid to move a muscle, to breathe, to think, to eat, to trust again.
Yet here I am, in Cape Town, South Africa.
Still trying to trust.
How do I sum up our month in China in so many words? How do I put what I’ve been through into words so that you would not only understand, but that you would care to read? That, I don’t have the answer to. I can only pray and hope that my amateur powers of description and much more amateur grasp of English can keep your attention for the stories that God has given me the privilege to tell.
When we landed in Hong Kong, we had to take a 30 hour train ride to the northwestern region of China (I did not have a bed for 2 nights, and I had a strange Chinese man sleep on my shoulder). We reached our destination city, and there, also, our directive. The first sentence of the instructions for our team was, “Your team will have the hardest and most dangerous route.” We knew then, in that hotel room, that these next weeks were going to be interesting. We had nothing to go on but the names of a couple of cities. We had no ministry contacts, no places to stay, no maps, and no freaking clue what we were doing. It was in obedience that we went to our first city. It was in utter dependency on God that when we stepped down from our bus, we turned left because the spirit told us to. Maria and I left the group to find a place to stay. After the first three inquiries saying that they did not accept any guests that were foreigners, we felt hopeless and fearful.
Holding my breath, we tried one last hotel. The receptionist was jovial and accommodating immediately. We booked the rooms and Maria and I rushed back to tell the girls. The receptionist and the manager of the hotel was so excited to receive us that they asked if they could take photos with us, then, offered to give us a very extensive tour of the entire city. After the day ended, he confessed to us that the day he had just spent with us was one of a total of 10 rest days in 2 years. That night, as we were worshipping and praying aloud in our hotel room, there were loud and abrupt knocks on our door. I opened the door to seven policemen flashing their badges and requesting that they enter the hotel room. They begin interrogating me about the nature of our business in the town and who we were and where we were heading next. My heart was beating at a million beats a second. Had they heard us? What if I said the wrong thing? Did they know? They began taking photographs of our passports and of us. We were all in our pajamas, dumbfounded that something like this could be happening to us on our first night alone in China. They reassured us that what they were doing was “for our own safety” and that we needed to prop a chair against the door when we slept. There was running and shouting in the corridors, and we were told to leave the hotel the very next morning. When the last policeman walked out the door, my knees gave way, and I began to sob. I had never before been so terrified in my life. In a city full of hotels that shooed us out of their lobbies and off of their doorsteps, the authorities had entered our very hotel rooms and essentially evicted us. It was then that I understood just how threatening the gospel was.
So we prayed.
Hard.
That night, I woke up, seemingly driven by a force that was not my own. I went into the bathroom and don’t remember much, only that I fell, and cut myself very deeply. I noticed that I was bleeding, but I went to bed without cleaning the wound. The next morning, I realized that the gash on my knee was in the exact shape of the province we were called to minister in for the month.
When I spoke to the receptionist the next morning, they had been fined about Y1,000 for housing us. One of the policemen from the night before knocked on our door again around 9 am, asking us for our next location. He thought we were morons because we didn’t have a map (which, of course, in retrospect, we were), so he gave us a map, brought us breakfast, and practically saw us on the bus to our next destination. Our next city was not on our itinerary, but it was a city the policeman had suggested that we go to because it had a large monastery that was interesting to see, and he knew someone there. So. . . we went.
Turns out the friend that the policeman had was. . . a Tibetan monk. We were given a personal tour of the monastery and of the monk’s home. It was there that I learned of where we were, and why we were such an immediate threat. We were, and had been, in Tibet. Or, what was Tibet about five decades ago. Things began to click in my puzzled mind. I had heard of the “Free Tibet” movement written on t-shirts and honey-granola eating hippies chattering on and passing out bracelets, but I had never heard of it from a Tibetan – a prisoner in his own land. As we sat sipping tea in the monk’s room, we heard stories about monasteries being destroyed, monks setting themselves on fire, Tibetan children struggling to learn their own language, a lost identity, and oppression as thick as the walls surrounding the monastery. I felt my heart crumble knowing that Daddy’s heart was breaking even more – desiring to deliver His people. I asked the monk if we could pray for him.
“Pray? What do you mean, pray?”
“Prayer means. . . talking to God”
“How do you pray?”
“You close your eyes, and bow your head.”
Six of us girls gathered around our Tibetan monk, and prayed. We prayed for oppression to be lifted, we prayed for freedom, for identity, for release, and for protection. When I opened my eyes after saying Amen, he had tears in his eyes and his hands clasped so tightly.
Turns out – the policeman that had helped us, was Tibetan too.
In our next town, we actually stayed in a room of a hotel that housed some of the Chinese military. Wise. We found a horse trekking tour, and decided to sign up for it. The tourguide was a man who had hiked to India to learn English and to meet the Dali Lama and spent a month and a half in prison because he was detained by the Chinese government. The morning that we were supposed to go horse trekking, we woke to a blanket of snow covering the town! We rode about five hours on horse into the snowy mountains and stayed in a nomadic tent. The next morning, one of our tourguides asked what I was reading, and I told him, the Bible. He had never heard of it. So I let him read Psalm 23 – when he read it aloud, I began to cry. That night, we were invited to his friend’s bar to dance traditional Tibetan dances (which, apparently is more freestyle than it seems – you dance around in a circle, flailing and interchanging toe tapping), and to sing. We sang worship onstage at a bar. The morning we left that town, we sat on the street corner and sang about 30 minutes worth of worship songs as a crowd gathered around and some tried to sing along.
Our final two towns were filled with their own miraculous stories, and when we went back to our original city, we were introduced to an underground Bible school. There, we also sang, and went on our knees to pray upon the feet of the students. While kneeling, praying, and sobbing for the few and the young followers, I was so grateful.
Never before in my life had I needed to be so desperately dependent on the Lord. Never before had I not known where next I was going to lay my head or who was going to offer and invite us into their lives. Every single day I felt inadequate. Every single day I wished that I could do more for my team – that I was fluent and completely literate in Chinese, but I wasn’t. Yet God still used me for the weak and bumbling interlocutor that I turned out to be. I have seen so much. . .and my heart breaks continually for the Tibetan people. I may have physically left their soil, but I really do believe that God’s work does not and will not end with me or with geography.
Here’s to another month.
