| I’ve become desensitized to all these Red
Cross American Blood drive ads [I get tons of these emails saying my help is
needed and they all my house all the time.. good thing they don’t have my cell
phone # seriously…]. They would be better off not seeming so needy and maybe
contact me only every once in awhile, then I might actually feel like it’s a
privilege.
Wait
a minute. Take a step back. What the heck? What is wrong with me when I begin
to get annoyed that someone who cares for others is asking me to help?
Sad…
So I went to Asia during winter break… we went to Taiwan first
and celebrated New Years there, which involved us first going to this rich
persons’ dinner party to going to join the hundreds of thousands of people at
101. that was a truly amazing experience. Normally it would take like 20-30 min
(?) to get back to our hotel from there, but on this particular night, it took
2(+) hours. Now imagine if the 101 were in China where they have 1.3 billion
people. It would’ve taken like a week to get back haha.
Then we went to Hong Kong,
which is pretty stankin awesome. I’ve been to HK once before when I was like 7
or something, and I’ve never had a real good impression of it. But dammnn. It’s
nice. The people never go to sleep. Like seriously… It’ll be 2am on a weekday
and the grocery stores are still packed with people. It’s an amazing place.
And then to China.
Really I have nothing good to say about China except that Bev and Mo are
there, and spending 2 nights with them was worth the freezing cold and what
ever traumas I had to endure.
Coincidentally I’m finally putting up Asia
pictures right after I finished my book report on Jesus in Beijing by
David Aikman. This book was amazing. Well actually, I probably would have
written it differently, as the guy focuses on some things I feel aren’t
important, but some of the points and events he relates are amazing.
When we typically think of China we think of a Communist state
that regulates everything it’s people have access to, so how could Christianity
develop in a place such as this? Well, it has. Most remarkable is the story
about a city called Wenzhou, also known as China’s “Jerusalem”
(or to some Wenzhou Christians, China’s
“Antioch”
rather). Wenzhou
did not have a Christian presence until an eccentric one-legged Scotsman,
George Stott, arrived in 1867. The locals didn’t exactly welcome Stott, which
comes as no surprise as Chinese people are known to look down upon even fellow
Chinese who they may feel have become too Westernized. “But precisely because he
was an invalid, his sheer courage impressed a few of the Wenzhou citizenry” (183). Following the
“anti-rightist campaign” of 1957, Wenzhou
was declared to be a “religion-free” zone. It was China’s first officially atheist
city and churches and temples were closed. When Mao’s Great Leap Forward
campaign was abandoned in 1962, churches were permitted to reopen. But even
this was short-lived, as the break out of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, once
again closed all the churches. But in Wenzhou
the Christians continued to meet, often on the hillsides outside the city. One
man, Zhen Datong comments, “the church in Wenzhou
was very good during the Cultural Revolution… We never stopped meeting. The
China Inland Mission had laid a good foundation here. The old Christians knew
how to pray” (186). So during the Cultural Revolution when all Christians were
forced to go underground, the Wenzhou
church survived, when at least almost all of the others did not. And not only
did it survive, but it’s biblical and theological teaching, which had been very
thorough before 1949, continued to be so during the Revolution.
The most amazing thing to me about the Wenzhou Christians,
however, is their heart for evangelism. Many Wenzhou have received a vision from God in
which there are two armies. One from Henan,
which would go along the Silk Road to Afghanistan. And a second from Wenzhou, which would take the ocean route to the Persian Gulf. This vision, or mission statement, is known
as “Back to Jerusalem.”
Aikman writes, “the city’s Christians have a longing that they share with an
overwhelming majority of China’s Protestant Christian population: to move out
on a missionary road that will take the Gospel back to the Middle East, from
which it originally came to Europe, North America, and finally China” (192)
On a side note… In honor of the Morrison bicentennial in
2007, China
would like to raise 100,000 Christian missionaries to send out to the world.
For a comparison, the total estimate for American Protestant and Catholic
missionaries working overseas in any given year is around 40,000 to 50,000. and
the US
annually sends more missionaries overseas than any other single country by far.
Also, their current effort is built on two centuries of experience and the
considerable wealth of ordinary Americans.
So why do many Chinese feel the need to go to the Middle East? Mark Ma remarks that “since the beginning at
Pentecost, the pathway of the Gospel has spread, for the greater part, in a
westward direction: from Jerusalem to Antioch, to all of Europe; from Europe to
America and then to the East; from the southeast of China to the northwest;
until today from Gansu on westward it can be said there is no firmly
established church.” By the Chinese bringing the Gospel to the Middle East would complete the circle around the world. If
you know your geography you would already have realized that this means the
Chinese are specifically speaking about ministering to the Muslim nations,
which clearly is their main obstacle on their way towards completing the
circle. Why the Muslims and why the Chinese? Ma believes that God has told him
that it is not that the hearts of the Muslims are especially hard but that He
has kept for the Chinese
Church a portion of the
inheritance. … mann. That is… I don’t even know what to say. Amazing at the
very least.
Is it reasonable to believe that the Chinese could actually
accomplish this Muslim goal they have set for themselves? From an intellectual
standpoint it is actual more believable then we would typically think. While to
Americans this feat of reaching to the Muslim world is extremely daunting, but
to the Chinese it isn’t—well not as much. You see, as one Chinese man points
out, “the Muslims prefer Chinese to Americans” (12). This Muslim affiliation
for the Chinese is mostly due to China’s official government
position of supporting the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular.
“Paradoxically, the fact that China’s
government is seen by the Arab world as supportive of their side in the
Arab-Israeli dispute heartens the house churches in their hopes of evangelizing
the world’s Muslims” (202).
To conclude, Aikman believes it is very possible that
Christians could constitute 20 to 30 percent of China’s population within three
decades. While 20-30 % doesn’t seem like much—or at least to me it didn’t at
first—let’s take a moment and put that into context. The official figure of
Christian believers is 21 million, but this number could be as high as 80
million. For a population of 1.3 billion Chinese, even 80 million Christian
believers would only account for some six percent of the entire population.
Now, if that percentage were to rise to 30% that would mean something like 300
million converts over the next 30 years. And to further put that into context,
the total population in the United
States has yet to reach 300 million…
Alright, now what do you think? Amazing no? What this would mean for the world
is simply incomprehensible…
101 (the current tallest building in the world i believe) Exploding
Cheap Advertisment
The tons of people at 101
Lazy cousin at 101
Some family lovin'
Lo: the Business Family
3 of the many Lo cousins
Me racing Ivan at TAS (He's two years younger, but freaking like two feet taller...)
Crazy father...
Crazier cousin... (look how she's rockin the hotel's slippers like they were name brands or something)
Hong Kong (amazing huh?)
Heaven on Earth? (hey, isnt that the massage joint Chris Tucker n Jackie Chan hit up in Rush Hour 2?)
Eric, Andrea, and Me at the Twins concert in HK (that was truly retarded...)
The Littlest of the Lo Cousins
Some place in China, i don't even remember where anymore... maybe Guongzhou?
Morris, Bev, & Skylar... (what amazing people. who have given up everything to serve God in China. the struggles they go through everyday is unimaginable. i was in China for like 4 days and i couldnt even stand it. when i told Bev this, she was like, good. cause that's what we have to go through every day..)
and lastly is my most prized photograph...
at Stanley Market, HK, Andrea asked me to take a picture for her. and what a picture i took. yes, she's there. just hidding behind that man who decided to walk right into the picture as i was taking it haha. oh this still cracks me up...
and there you go! that's Asia. too bad i didn't take any pictures of the Chinese countryside however... amazing place. and it's truly wonderful to hear how God is moving...
Welcome to McDonalds (Asia) -- i just had to include this... yeeah boy~ you can kinda see there menu. if you notice you'll see like wraps on the 4th panel to the right. that's their attempt to be healthy, hah. the health issue is apparently big now. and many people are therefore opposed to KFC and McD...
1st McDonalds Meal (HK i believe) - those are Chicken Wings which my cousin Eric said would be good--they were aight...
2nd McD Meal - that's a Red Bean pie right there, pretty darn tasty...
Korean Beef Flatbread & Curly Fries
Weird, but tasty..
Taro Root Pie (Morris told me about this strange fellas.. definitely not as good as the red bean ones)
No matter how much she pretended to hate it, Andrea really does love McDonalds. Pictures don't lie, people lie...
 
|
