Just Don’t Get It

This weekend, I ate lunch with a friend, Jt., who comes to our Bible study very regularly. He’s a great guy, really genuine, pretty smart and ambitious. He’s one of the few at our study that’s actually from our school. We have far more students coming from a few different universities. Strange how that’s worked out, still not sure how or why that’s happened, though I suspect it had something to do with the other schools’ better established English Corners, a top-of-the-funnel activity for us.

So anyways, Jt. and I ran to a small restaurant near our school that serves a good bunch of American foods, especially sandwiches. The owner is a Christian, also an expatriate. Naturally, I went with the cheeseburger, and Jt. was excited to order his first American hot dog. Which he had lots of questions about. What’s the red stuff? What’s the yellow stuff? Okay, I guess he had a few questions about it. How many questions can you really ask about a hot dog, anyway?

I’ve written before about Jt. and about some of the good conversations I’ve had with him at our study, so I wanted to schedule this time to get a better idea of where he was at spiritually. I told him, “You get to listen to what I think every week, so I thought I’d ask you what you think about everything.” So he told me…

He wasn’t really sure. He believes in God. But he’s not sure about Jesus. Basically, he imagined a difference between the two. And he wasn’t sure who he should believe in. So we talked about the Trinity (a popular topic, actually, I answered that question three times this weekend), Jesus’ claims of deity (which he missed at our Bible study as he was visiting his hometown for his summer break), and finally we rounded into the Gospel. We were standing right in front of the gate to the school, and I explained to him God’s plan of salvation using English and Chinese about half-and-half. Pretty thrilling to see the pieces coming together for him. Please pray for Jt. I believe he’s close to making a decision to follow Christ!

I’m trying to notice the questions that regularly surface. When I was preparing to come over here, I thought everyone would be a science expert or something, so I studied a lot about creation vs. evolution, atheism, etc. Time that probably would have been better spent elsewhere. It’s good to have a base in things like that, but the people that need to hear long lists of proofs and facts from those areas of science to believe are few and far between.

Rather surprisingly, it seems the greatest obstacle to faith here is not disbelief in the existence God, but a lack of understanding about God. They just don’t get it. It’d be like you talking to me about art. I have no information. No point of reference. No interest, anyway. I know art exists. I know there’s “art people” out there. I can nod my head with the best of them, but I ain’t gonna convert. Because I don’t get it. There’s something to think about. What’s something that, in the past, you just didn’t get? But now you get it. What changed? A person you met? A fact you discovered? An event in your life? Something you read? An event you attended? A speaker you heard? Questions like these are pretty important for us to think about if we’re really out to help people “get it.”

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