Changes For The Better

For the past ten days or so, my language teacher has been in his hometown for the festival, so my normal language studies have taken a break. But it has given me a great opportunity to focus on some areas that really need attention – namely, listening comprehension and vocabulary. To develop the first I pretty much tripled my time spent listening to Chinese everyday. It’s really amazing the progress you can make in a couple weeks when you really focus hard on one aspect. For the second, I’m spending a lot more time reading. Especially the same things several times. Most people that have big vocabularies in English are the ones that are big readers – good chance that works in other languages, too. These couple exercises have really paid off for me – talking to people this weekend, I’ve felt more comfortable than ever before listening to their Chinese. 

St. got back in town today. Gave me a call to let me know that he shared the Gospel with his family and that they were far from upset or condemning. It was the first time his mother had heard anything like that. His older sister and her boyfriend were most interested and said that they’d probably want to become Christians in the future (turns out that her boyfriend has another friend that is a pastor and witnesses to him about Christ). St. says they were happy to hear it but aren’t exactly ready to act on it. But after this vacation, his family said that there’s been a change in his life (for the better) and they’re impressed. We’re going to have to make it a point this semester to set aside some time for prayer for friends and family that don’t know Jesus. For most family members, it will take some real consistency for a real long time on the part of the new Christian.