Unsolicited emails have a bad reputation, so I did not pay attention to one that a colleague, whom I did not know well, sent me in late spring 2013. It was a request to connect with my wife because she (the colleague, whom I'll name J) wanted to find out more about homeschool. J was moving her family from Shanghai to Xi'an, and she was considering homeschooling her kids.
I must have still been ruminating the scraps of information from the gathering in January when I replied her email, because I made a casual remark about Xi'an being the start of the Silk Road, and there are missionaries trying to carry the Gospel into Central Asia. That throwaway line resonated with her. There is no coincidence in life. It turned out that J was moving as part of the Gospel's westward spread from China proper, across Central Asia, all the way to Jerusalem, back where it started when my Lord Jesus promised the power of the Holy Ghost to be His witnesses to the uttermost part of the Earth.
J invited me to a sharing session in a Korean church. This was the first time I had contact with people who endured hardship for the sake of the Gospel. To know about their story was God answering my wife's prayer. God had shown me a glimpse of His plan for China.
Western missionaries had brought the light of Christ to nearly every part of the world, from the late Roman Empire & the Middle East, to India, Africa, the New World, and later, East Asia and the Pacific. There was one region where none had made headway - Central Asia. This region is the prize God has reserved for the Chinese church. I knew then that my family was allowed into China to be a part of this. If I could support my Chinese brothers & sisters in this, then my family's existence would have meaning, meaning that transcends our time on Earth.
John records my Lord Jesus saying that those who would worship God must worship Him in spirit and in truth. So before I go further, as head of my household, I must live a life of truth. But what is truth? There is no more taste in living a life spent chasing the ephemeral. God wants reconciliation, and He cries when even one person is hurt. Why would Jesus, who knew that He was bringing Lazarus back to life, weep? Shouldn't He be celebrating? He wept because He felt the pain of those who loved Lazarus.
And I had caused someone in my life to weep. And I had hated someone enough to have killed him in my thoughts a hundred times over. This pain & hate defined me until Jesus set me free. Free to walk away from that character-defining hatred, but most important, free to forgive them, to ask for their forgiveness, to seek reconciliation. I feel that this reconciliation must be done before I can move on to help my Chinese brothers & sisters. Anything less would not be living a life of truth.
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