The Gospel in China

J. is probably a foot shorter than I am (I love this country!). And he has come to our Bible studies and our leadership meetings faithfully since he got back from his hometown this summer. He’s funny – he talks during everything, but mostly to himself. He smiles a lot – seems like the happiest […]

Yesterday was one of those feel-like-you-got-hit-by-a-truck-when-you-finally-lay-in-bed days. In a good way. I’ll try to fit my account of yesterday’s events into one entry. St. came over yesterday morning to spend four hours with me. We studied the book of Acts and talked about Paul and his ministry. He was in chapter 16, where Paul meets […]

Exciting day yesterday. Our friend from Taiwan is in town now, and he spoke at a friend’s underground church across town last night. We had close to a dozen people from our Bible study come along, and I was so happy to finally let them have the opportunity to experience Bible teaching in their own […]

Went back to the university yesterday afternoon for the verdict: they’re not going to give us our own teacher, we’re registered for one six-hour-a-week class, and we got half our money back. They’re happy because, between the two of us, we’re paying for 20 hours of class a week and taking 12. We’re happy because, […]

We’re still holding our breath about this next semester of university classes. I went in yesterday, paid the $1200 or so for me and my wife’s tuition. Then we went to another room to pick out our class. There were three ladies sitting in there with a layout of all the books in the language […]

It’s finally back-to-school time! I have to go register today at the university. Hope that goes well. I have to tell them that I think all of their classes are wrong for me, so I want them to start a new one… how could that not go well? I’m really fairly hopeful, though – the […]

As an American witnessing to Chinese people, I think there is a need for a lot of caution to avoid drawing a cultural line between us. This won’t probably be as necessary in the future when we have trained Chinese workers. But when the only discipled Christian in the room happens to be an American, […]

Bible study last night in our home. School is still out, but our space situation is about at a crisis level! We used every seat in my house (plus just about everything resembling a seat), but we just barely had enough. So we’ll grab some chairs of some kind this week and make do for […]

Yesterday my language teacher, W., and I got to talking about superstitions and luck. She told me that the government today works hard to make sure the Chinese people don’t live by the superstitions that haunted their ancestors. I pulled out the “hey-America’s-messed-up-too” card (if you want to be a missionary, you might want to […]

Why is language learning so tedious and strenuous? Because it consists primarily of two hateful tasks: memorizing and recalling from memory. Every “learn a language in 30 days” technique is really an attempt to make memorizing easier. Chances are, one of your least favorite tasks in schools was memorization. But there’s no escaping memorization if […]