Burn Money Day

Yesterday was the Pure Brightness Festival. This is kind of Chinese/Buddhist Memorial Day. Celebrated by going to graves of loved ones (often outside of the city on a mountain or something) and by burning money in the streets. Not real money – just some fake Afterlife-opoly money. Let the deceased buy themselves something nice in the next world. A friend of mine joked with me that today the inflation rates in the afterlife are really terrible – all this new money filling up their world. But it was pretty amazing to see little groups of campfires by the curb all along the street. As you could probably guess, there’s not a lot of college students out burning money, so I’m not sure how devout the average person is out there burning money. It’s a strong tradition – but not strong enough that indifferent college students take part in it.

On the training front, we’ve decided to transform the Friday night class into the beginnings of our Bible institute. I was tempted to teach three or four classes this semester, but then I had a moment of clarity and realized the insanity of such a plan. So what we did was make the Friday class open invitation for anyone interested in a little deeper Bible study. The reason we didn’t before is that I wanted a time to talk to S. and T. about what was going on around the church without a bunch of other “outsider” ears listening in. But we’re meeting at other times throughout the week now, so that doesn’t matter too much – I’ve got lots of other opportunities to talk to them privately.

We really had a great number show up last night for that – at least a dozen students showed up. Not sure they’ll come back – we were on Jeremiah and Lamentations. But I was really surprised by the interest level. It seemed like everyone had a good time. I couldn’t resist with that many faithful members in one spot and took the last twenty minutes to do a short discipleship lesson. It really surprised me which students came out for the class. I honestly don’t know how half of them even knew about it – we didn’t really push it hard or anything.