This quick trip to our friend’s house was not all that special because of me being particularly spiritual or “on” (I wasn’t, after nearly four weeks of continuous travel and crazy schedules in my life), or because of our amazing conversations about the Lord (we barely had any), but rather because we got to spend time with one of our key friends, staying in his house, sharing meals with his family, and showing him with our actions that we care about him.  I’m glad we got to spend time with Chuck, and we believe that he will come into the Family this semester, and one day be a rock and foundation of the church here.

Thank you so much for your prayers and support over the last month and a half.  It’s been crazy: a two week visit by my family (yay!), 10 days in Thailand, a spur-of-the-moment two-day trip to Chuck’s house, a week of special teaching for the city while our friends were gone, and now we’re diving back into a “regular” schedule.  On top of that, I’ve had some other cool things happening in my life – shoot me an email if you want to know more! 

Can I ask you to pray for a few key things in this next month?  They are:

• Help for me to focus on friends in the home stretch of our time in Asia.  There are many things, all of them good, also calling out for my attention as CT changes and we start looking ahead to planning for next year, and I need wisdom to integrate all of these things with my primary mission of planting a “family party” here on campus.
• Good health and energy, not just for me (I’ve got the sniffles today, but nothing too bad), but for our whole team so we can finish well in our last 2 ½ months here.
• Our Stateside team, as they do a blitz of recruiting for next year, prepare for our April training event and get ready for all of us to come home in May.  We only have two workers back home this year, and they’ve got a lot on their plate!

Thanks so much for your love, prayers, and support.  We’re reaching Asia together!

Ben

You may remember from my last post that Laura is the friend whose village Razzle and I went to visit during the Chinese New Year. Laura knows our Father and, as we sat on the stage preparing for the village singing competition, all Laura could think about was the fact that the sea of people in front of us were in need of the hope that our Father brings.  This evening we sat together at the glass table in our apartment.  Laura was shoveling food into her mouth, as she needed to leave fairly quickly.

It still has not rained. Laura’s father has had three surgeries and is unable to work.  Her parents are farmers, so they have no income this year and are now deep in debt because of the hospital bills.  Laura’s mother has moved to the city that we are in to find work.  She expects to leave Laura’s father for at least one year to earn money.  For the past few days Laura’s mother has been working and sleeping at a restaurant.  She works 7am-10pm with barely enough time to eat two meals.  Laura will go with her mother the next morning to help her find a different job.

God has placed Laura so deeply on my and Razzle’s hearts and has made it clear that she is a friend that we should invest in.

“Laura,” I ventured, “Razzle and I really would like to spend more time with you and wanted to ask if you would like to meet together each week.  We can read the same chapters in the Bible the previous week and talk about what we feel God is speaking to us through it and what He wants us to do about it. We can ask each other difficult questions to help us grow.  We can spend time praying for friends and family that don’t yet know our Father.  We will also begin a Bible study on Friday nights for those that are interested in knowing Him more.”

“Ginger, that is exactly what I have done with friends before!” Laura replied.  “I would love to meet with you each week! And I will ask my roommates if they want to come Friday nights!  They do not yet want to make a decision, but I think they are interested to learn who Jesus is.”

We sat around the table together and prayed for Laura’s father’s health, for her mother to find a better job, and that the rain would come…and we believe that He hears us.  I tell Laura that I think God’s favorite language is Chinese.  She agrees.

Please pray for:

1. Laura and her family — that her relationship with our Father would grow, that she would come to truly understand grace, and for our weekly times with her.  For her parents’ health and financial situation.
2. Our team is beginning a Bible study this coming Friday.  It is evangelistic and discussion-based, and we will be inviting all of our friends.  Please pray that those that need to come would come, and that our friends would come to understand Jesus more through this time.
3. Please pray for me as I am seeking God’s heart regarding where I should be next year.  I do not yet have clarity where that should be and I feel divided between many different places and people.

Thank you!  He is at work here!  He always proves Himself faithful, and He will prove Himself to you.

In His Love,

Ginger

That was the end of the celebration, and a couple of days have passed, but I wanted to share that memory with you because it is a real part of my life here.  Normally it’s not quite so crazy, and we’ve recently taken advantage of the holiday season to have some speakers come and share God’s heart with us.  It has been good and challenging at the same time.  I feel like I have so many areas of my life to grow in, and don’t quite know where to start.

Here’s something exciting to share with you- my team got together just the other day to plan out what the church is going to look like here!  Now that we have several friends in our family, we want to start meeting together regularly, and we took some time to listen to God’s heart and plan together about what those meetings will look like.  I’m excited!  It’s something we’ve prayed for a lot, and soon it will be a reality!  We hope to start meeting within a couple of weeks.  Please lift up our new brothers and sisters, that they will draw closer to God and each other as we begin to meet together regularly.

So this is a kind of scattered recollection of what’s been happening for the last little while.  I feel like God is doing a lot in my heart and it’s good, but not necessarily easy.  Please pray that I receive and submit to what He is doing, and draw closer to Him during this time.  Also, I have to make some more important decisions soon.  Please pray that I will have wisdom and follow Him as He speaks to me. 

I hope to send you some more detailed stories soon of what’s happening here.  God is good, and He is moving and working in our midst.

 All for Him,

Skittles

Fast-forwarding two weeks, I’m back in GZ.  I’m standing in my apartment while staring at a map of Asia that is hanging in my hallway. As I look at this map, it brings me back to the day when I was walking the village streets.  I am suddenly reminded that the effects of the work that I am doing in GZ will spread to cities and villages all throughout the Asian countryside.  I am reminded that this is no small job.  I’m reminded that my vision is often too small because what God is doing in this country is beyond what words can express. 

Fast forward to yesterday.  All my college friends have arrived back to school and I am finally able to see everyone that I have missed so much in the past month.  Apple and I meet in the morning and take a walk down the river.  I share with her about my trip to Thailand and the village, she shares with me about Spring Festival and her family traditions.  I ask her if she told her parents that she is a Christian.  Apple, filled with excitement, tells me about how she has been reading her Bible every single night and that she would carry it everywhere she went.  She tells me about the day that she told her mom that she believes in God.  Her mom has never heard of or seen a Bible, so Apple begins to explain to her everything that she knows about what it means to be a Christian.  While her mom hasn’t chosen to believe in God yet, I know that Apple’s testimony will continue to impact her family and her hometown.  Small acts of obedience here in GZ are impacting people and cities hundreds of miles away.  Praise God!

With only three months left in Asia before I return home for the summer, I am beyond expectant to see God work in the lives of my friends.  I am trusting Him for the salvations of many of my friends that are so close to making a decision to follow Him.  I’m trusting God for their families as well!  My team and I are praying in faith to see the Church up and running with 20 consistent members.  There is nothing wrong with dreaming big!!!

Thanks for all your prayers and support!!!

 ~Love,

Amilah~

It’s been a long long time, I know. Much has happened since the
last update. I’ve gone on journeys to distant lands and have had
little that resembles my conventional schedule. Our friends whom we
are reaching have been away on holiday, so it’s given us a
different focus in the past month. But I am back in the saddle
again. I will give you a bit of a rundown as to all that’s been
happening.

About a month ago, our entire organization headed to Thailand for
our yearly conference. This is usually a powerful time of
impartating of wisdom by visiting speakers and impartation for our
continuing work. But this conference more than any other was a
milestone in my life. Soon before leaving I was struck by something
that God had placed on my heart, and that is this. We, as the body of
Jesus Christ, are called into so much. We have the authority and commission to change the world, and reverse the progress of the enemy. But in order to fully walk in this, we must have an eternal kingdom mindset.

Jim Elliott said before he was killed on the field, “He is no fool to lose what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose”, or something close to that. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is we are created for something eternal that is far beyond our own comprehension and imagination. When we see our place in that, nothing can limit the impact that we as a body can have. I could go on about this for pages but I won’t, for now.

To make a long story short, I arrive at the conference to find that the theme is the Kingdom of God, and it encouraged me so much right where I was at and filled me with an expectancy for the future that I’ve never had before.

From the conference I travled to another province in Asia to visit a
friend and his family for the spring festival ( New Year). We
ate a lot of food and played with a lot of fireworks in crowded city
streets and had a great time. But it was even more special because
our friend who we went to visit had become a recent Christian and we had a great time of sharing and encouraging him. On a quick
side note, we also have another friend that lived near by who is a Christian and we visited her as well. All the women in her family
are believers, held up by her grandmother, who is the sweetest and
most genunine woman of God you’ll ever meet. So that was pretty
special.

Right now we’re going through a week of training sessions with
visiting church leaders from back home. I could write about
that for several pages as well, but I won’t for now.

As for me, I’m feeling direction to new areas in the near future
and I’ll be happy to tell you about that if you’d like. It’s going
to be good. But for now we have our mission in this land and I know
that many more amazing things are going to happen in the next twelve weeks before we go.

Please continue to lift up our team and our work, it’s needed. And
if you are able to give financially to my work here, it’s very much
needed. I’m about a thousand dollars in debt to the overhead
organization, which greatly limits my available resources here.
It’s a need that I’m doubtless our God can meet, but I do need your
help.

As always, you guys are the best. I’ve said it many times before
and I meant it every time. Please keep in touch, I’d love to hear
from you as well.

God bless,
Shamgar

That night, as I was looking through my schedule for the following day, I thought about my little conversation with Rozanne that morning and I asked myself this question, “Do I actually feel bored?”  My roommate, Amilah, was away in another city to visit a Chinese friend for Spring Festival and I’m all alone in our little apartment.  Do I feel bored?  My answer to my own question made me smile!  It was “no, not at all”.

One of the tasks that I had to accomplish this past week was to send out a quarterly report to my home church and one part of it was to do a self-assessment on my strengths and weaknesses.  As I was writing this report, it finally dawned on me that being self-disciplined is one of my assets.  I tend to know how to use my time efficiently.  I’m always able to do something useful with my time.

God has also been teaching me a lot about “multitasking”.  Even while we may be engaging in activities that do not seem to have a direct impact on the work we are doing, if we would surrender these activities to Him, He’ll use them to teach us something.  I was learning how to bike on my own the past week.  Sad to say that I wasn’t making any huge progress and feeling totally discouraged at some points, I feel that God was even using this to strengthen the inner man in me.  It’s so easy for me to just give up and stop trying but with each failure, I’m also learning to persevere and perseverance is definitely an essential attribute that we need to acquire if we want to last long in this field!  While I was on campus ground learning to fail miserably at biking, God was also consistently reminding me to keep lifting up the campus to Him while I was there.

Time is a precious gift from God!  Once it’s lost, it’ll never be found.  Are you bored?  Take time to call a friend to encourage him/her, read a good book, learn something new, etc!  If we are faithful to be good stewards of the resources He’s given us and are being intentional that we want to do everything for His glory, He can turn around even an ordinary and simple activity into something extraordinary to bless us and others.

Eagle

One day a couple months ago I was having some problems I needed to talk out, and our bike guard lady just happened to be the closest one nearby with a listening ear. Using the Chinese I know, I told her my problems, and she gave me condolences in return. Afterward, she hugged me, which is very rare in C-land. People show affection in other ways, like putting their arm over the other person’s shoulders while walking down the street or even holding hands, but very rarely do Chinese people hug. I was amazed and completely blessed that she initiated this show of emotion. Ever since then, whenever I see her (and I mean WHENEVER I see her) she freely and openly hugs me.

So she invited me to have dinner with them, and since I wasn’t traveling, I gladly accepted. It’s so wonderful to feel like you have family with which to spend the biggest holiday in Asia.

I wasn’t exactly sure when the meal was because she told me “afternoon”, so I showed up a little after 12:00 to see that she was just starting to prepare the food. She was squatting at a facet, running a knife along a long stringy piece of meat. Yes, she was cutting open the intestines of some kind of animal (I was guessing chicken based on the wet feathers on the ground at the base of the facet), cleaning out the fecal matter. I started to question whether I should change my mind and back out of the meal commitment.

I didn’t change my mind. I came back a couple hours later and hung out with the extended family members, watching reruns of previous Chinese New Year shows until the food was ready. After waiting two hours, we were all sitting around the table, and I was looking for the intestines. I couldn’t recognize them, so I’m not sure if I ate them or not. I filled up on some really delicious food, though, all homemade, which is a treat that I usually only get at this time of year.

Then I announced that I was full and needed to rest, which meant that I was done eating. I stayed at the table, enjoying the conversation between the adults, or in reality, the parts of it that I could understand. I was about to excuse myself when one of the adults pulled a black chicken foot out of a pot. I watched in horror as he dropped it in my rice bowl! Now I was obligated to stay longer and very obligated to eat it. I didn’t hear a word of conversation after that. It took all my mental, physical and emotional energy to put the foot in my mouth. Gnawing on it, trying not to think about the claws, I finally managed to pull some skin and cartilage off. After I ate what I thought was enough, I thanked my guests for their generosity and headed back to my apartment, but not before getting another invitation to come back over for another meal tomorrow.

Even though I’ve lived here for a while, there are still things that catch me by surprise. I’m reminded I’m not completely Chinese yet; I’m still a little in shock from this afternoon’s experiences. As I’m wrapping up this blog, the sun is going down in the city, and so starts the onslaught of fireworks. I’ve been trying to gear myself up for a good solid 6 hours or more of fireworks…I plan on going up on the rooftop to see them going off all over the city. It should be a pretty amazing sight.

Happy New Year!!!

Dove

Every year we all sit around in a circle and share what we’re thinking about next year. People are nervous. For some, the sense of commitment to what God is doing in Asia looms large. Some are thrilled. For some, they’re not sure if their friends will judge them for moving on.

This year was different from last year. For our city group, only about half of us are returning next year. As we shared together, we felt joy for those who are stepping into new things they know God is calling them to. We felt sadness as we were impacted with how things will look different. We felt the weight of the decision for those who are still undecided.

For me, I know I will be here next year, unless God directs clearly otherwise. My time isn’t done yet. He’s given us a clear call to reach university students in Asia, and there’s more to be done. Thanks for standing with me!

-Knight

Thirty-four platforms, four rappelling lines, and two water breaks later, we were finished. During our retreat in Thailand, we had four full days to relax and be tourists. This was just one of these days. The trip was outstanding and provided multiple once-in-a-lifetime experiences, but that wasn’t the only thing we were there for. During the first week of our trip, all of our organization met up to listen to speakers from different sides of the world in order to refocus and re-inspire us for our work. It was a wonderfully energizing time, and God definitely worked through the whole experience.

-Aidan

On the second day of the conference, I started feeling pretty sick.  The next morning, when I woke up, I felt extremely sick.  Sicker than I have felt in many many years.  Because of this, I missed a large portion of the conference.  I was so disappointed, I have been healthy all along while in C-land, and as soon as I came to Thailand, I crashed.  I felt like I was missing out on so many different activities, services, and fun times.  And even when I was with everyone, I felt like I couldn’t even enjoy my time.  I was beginning to get angry with God, but He was so faithful through it all.

The first night, one of the TM workers came and sat next to me and took care of me like she was my mom.  It was probably one of the sweetest things that a complete stranger has ever done for me.  She was praying of me and she continued to check on me.  Several of my other friends also would constantly come in and see how I was doing.  The next day, I felt slightly better, but by the afternoon, I couldn’t even function.  We had a BBQ for dinner and I didn’t want to miss it, so I came down for five minutes and then went back up to my room.

As I got to my room, I sensed God saying that I shouldn’t spend the night alone and that I should go worship Him with all I have to offer, even if it isn’t much.  Reluctantly, I went back downstairs.  I felt miserable but I found a poll to rest my head on.  Moments later, worship began.  Out of nowhere, I felt my entire body being restored.  The pounding in my head instantly stopped, the fever lifted, and I worshiped and worshiped!  So many people were praying for me and God was faithful and completely healed me!!!  This was just another reminder of His love for me!

We will stay in Thailand until Thursday.  After this, I am going to spend the Chinese New Year with Lijun, my Chinese friend that studied in Oswego.  I am so excited that I will be able to connect with her again! I’m sure that I will have an awesome time and I can’t wait to share more about it!

~Amilah