Itsara

Last time I told you about how God took me from ignoring missions entirely to going on a month-long trip to China in 1998. It took a hot girl to make me pay attention, but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear God say, “Whatever works!” You may already know some of the huge impact that this relatively short trip in China had on me - I still talk about it to this day. But in the interest of staying focused, I will try to keep to the points that matter to the larger story of how we got to Thailand. If I spout my thoughts and philosophies on this weblog for any length of time though, you’ll be sure to hear more about this trip later on.

We first traveled to Hong Kong and stayed there a few days to get to know the rest of our team and to be briefed on the trip. On the surface, the mission trip was a cultural exchange program where we visited a university and roomed with Chinese students who wished to improve their English and learn about our culture. Having never been more than a few miles outside the US, I expected Hong Kong to be a very strange and unfamiliar place, so I was surprised that, even though I couldn’t read or speak to anyone, I felt comfortable there. Maybe it had something to do with growing up in a town where 40% of the population is east Asian, but I wasn’t afraid of much in Hong Kong - I actually liked it a lot.

The briefing we received was a little scarier. China is what is known as a “closed country”, which means they don’t let you in if they know you’re a missionary (hence the cultural exchange program). We were told that we could only have 2 Bibles in our bags (one for us and one as a gift) - any more than that and the customs officials (who carried automatic rifles) would get suspicious. We were told to be very careful about “witnessing”. We could talk about our own faith with no real problems, but we couldn’t be too forward about it because the students could get in very big trouble. We couldn’t even give our second Bible away unless they asked. And any correspondence we had with the rest of the world had to be worded very carefully, with names changed or omitted and without words like “prayer”, “mission trip”, “Jesus”, “Christian”, and basically any word you might find in a Christianese dictionary. Even our thank you letters that we wrote after we got back couldn’t use the names of any students we knew in China for fear of endangering them.

Now, I had always had some vague idea of what a missionary was. I imagined someone in a suit living with people in loincloths or beads and handing out Bibles or trying to preach to them in their language. Maybe occasionally another tribe would come and kill the missionaries, and then there would be a fantastic story of the people who came to spiritually avenge their friends’ deaths by converting the tribe. This concept, which I admittedly didn’t think through all the way, did not really appeal to me and was probably one of the reasons I ignored mission work. My trip to China took this concept, ambushed it, and burned it to the ground.

I wasn’t sure what kind of affect we would have, since we couldn’t actually tell them about Jesus unless they asked. What shocked me was that, at some point on the trip, every single student asked. All we did was live our lives. One student asked me about my relationship with Cindy (which invariably involved Jesus). One student asked why we read the Bible every morning. One student asked why a member of our team reconciled with and forgave another member of our team whom she was angry with. They all asked, and many were affected by the answers they got.

And my view of what a missionary, and even an evangelist, was was destroyed and replaced with a model of witnessing that I could be extremely comfortable with - even excited about. It was simply sharing my life with someone else. Crazy.

The next bit involves Cindy’s trip to Thailand, which I personally don’t have much to say about (though she might, if she can be convinced to post), but some details of which are an important precursor to our recent trip. And then a quick fast-forward to last year’s National Vineyard Pastor’s Conference.

Continue to Part 3.