Monday, August 21, 2006
17.8.06
woke up this morning to a brilliant qingdao sunshine. After the horrors of Beijing smog, this weather was simply divine. The beach here isn’t the nicest thing you’ve ever seen—sand a tad too brown, seaweed clinging unattractively off everything, and way too many local Chinese tourists and vendors shouting and screaming everywhere. But even that could not spoil the novelty of being close to sand and sun and sea after 8 months of deprivation for a beach bum like me. I reveled in it.Jason and I went out at 6 expecting it to be nice and peaceful, and to watch the tide go out and the sun rise, but at that early hour, the place was already teeming with tourists. The sun, we later found out, rose at 430am. Tough. Still, we managed to find Mary, this little girl whom we had met with her parents the night before. They had been one of the many curious Chinese beachgoers who’d stopped to hear us singing worship at 10pm last night. Eventually, in typical ISEC style, the worship session turned into a full blown evagelism extravaganza. This Mary girl was particularly interested in Korea, so I summoned Jason who entertained her the rest of the time.
In the late morning, we had a short debrief session, where we were told to think about the top 10 memorable moments in the trip, as well as come up with a 3 minute presentation/testimony, for use when presenting our summer experience with church at school or back home. I had fun thinking of the memorable moments.
After a lunch consisting of nothing but a variety of dumplings (delicious!) we headed down to the beach. On the way, we stopped by for 1 kuai ice cream. Weising got 2, just to get his 2 kuai off dave worth. As we walked to the beach ice cream in hand, it just struck me that there would never be a day like this again. It was a perfect day. It was like we had no worries, no troubles, just the sun and the balmy beach breeze, the endless seaa, the promise of an afternoon of fun, and most of all, such beautiful company. I would not rather have spent the day doing anything else with anyone else. It was just such a surreal sense of perfection and total satisfaction and bliss, that it almost scared me. what had I done to deserve this day?
In the evening, we went back down to have worship. Mary met me on the pavement above the beach. She said that she’d been waiting there since 9 and we were late. I was touched and felt bad. I talked with her while the others sang. She couldn’t find her mum, and later we discovered that Jason had been talking to her. Eventually, they had got on the subject of Christianity, at which point Jason’s Mandarin ability ended and he had to recruit Lisa to supplement. Mary’s dad, a law professor, soon came along too. Lisa did a great job of explaining her faith—a combination of logical reasoning and personal experience; of conviction and confidence tempered with startling honesty and humility. At fist, I was listening as I always do, to learn how to explain the bible better in Chinese. But soon, I was totally engaged, as were Mary and her parents. It was an incredible evening. At the end of it, both Mary’s parents were saying that they believed that there was truth in it, but that they could not believe, perhaps because they were both communist party members. We don’t know. All I know was that it was a most poignant moment for me. we were all exhausted, but Jason suggested that we pray for the family. They agreed. We laid hands on them, and Jason prayed while Lisa translated. He prayed that the family would one day overcome the barriers set up against tehm, and come to know the love of God, which had always been there for them. And he thanked god for meeting them through us tonight and for capturing them, because once he captures someone, he never intends to let them go. It was in echo of lisa’s words to them, that our meeting on the beach was not fate not chance nor coincidence, but the perfect plan and timing of God. This definitely features as one of the memorable moments on my list. It bumps off the Kelvin Karaoke night by a mile.
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