Unexpected Stories from the Field: When God Sees Your Struggles and Sends a Rock Concert

There are moments in the cultural adaptation process when it seems that things are hopeless. When you feel like you're never going to figure out how things work, or you simply don't have enough motivation to keep putting energy into trying. When the problem is not any particular difficulty or obstacle, it's that you're in a situation where the normal things you'd do to encourage yourself and push past difficult days and situations aren't possible, so your usual methods of overcoming are missing in action, and you're not sure what to replace them with.
And all that seems terribly unfair somehow when it was your desire to serve God that got you into this mess to begin with. Shouldn't His silences (if necessary) and blessings (yes please) line up properly with the peaks and valleys in our lives as we perceive them?


Then there are those moments which carry you forward, which keep encouraging you even when remembering them later, when sharing them with others. When God does things in your particular context that let you know He's there and He hasn't abandoned you.

A little over 6 years ago, last time I lived in Taiwan, after being there for a couple of months I was struggling inside. It was winter, and I was working through culture shock, had only had 4 weeks of Chinese lessons, was experiencing something like SADS from the endless cold rain in Taipei, and was not yet equipped to handle some of the psychological stress of the transition.

One evening, really struggling with my discouraged frame of mind, feeling beaten down and starting to have second thoughts about this whole year-in-Taiwan idea, I was walking down a street near Shi Da University, and on a whim stopped by a restaurant that had a picture menu up in the window which showed some tasty-looking meat. (picture menus are very nice when you don't know enough Chinese to order yet)
I hadn't randomly visited a restaurant on this street before, and in an incredible "coincidence" considering the number of restaurants in the area and the fact that she lived on the other side of Taipei, my Chinese teacher (who was only a year older than me) was also eating in that restaurant with some of her other students. Imagine you live in Manhattan and your friend lives in the Bronx and you randomly find yourselves at the same Subway in Queens. The odds of this happening are too low to bother trying to calculate them. God arranges meetings.

Anyway, fast forward through some other unlikely events, and a few hours later, I find myself running up concrete stairs, led by my Chinese teacher. She speaks to a guard who surprisingly gives permission for us to crouch down and slide under a slightly raised metal door. Suddenly I am assaulted by a stadium-full of light and rock music and roaring fans. I am in a Linkin Park concert in the Taipei Soccer Stadium, for free. As I am adjusting to the sudden explosion of stimuli, a drink is placed in my hand; "this is for you!"

Thanks to whoever took this pic of that concert, I didn't have a camera with me
(And our cellphone cameras were not very impressive in 2007)

It was a very good night. If you think God wouldn't arrange a very unlikely chain of coincidences that ended with one of His children attending a free rock concert to encourage them, you simply don't know Him well enough, or how much He loves you as an actual person (not a hypothetical "saint" who supposedly manages to be the holier version of a living sacrifice that only understands the sacrifice part), and wants you to grow closer to Him from wherever you are. I felt His abounding love that night nearly as strongly as I ever have.

I considered it an unexpected gift from Him, and was deeply grateful and not a little encouraged. I had not really been taught that God gave us these kinds of gifts, ones that were personally meaningful and not just spiritually significant. This was something I really enjoyed, not another lesson or obligation (you may detect legalism in my upbringing, you would be correct), did God give this kind of blessing too? Apparently so, if it wasn't somehow heretical to believe that God would arrange unlikely circumstances just so I could have a fun experience because He was happy to let me have it.
I was very excited.
"Ok Satan, my God saw you exploiting my struggling with your attacks of discouragement and countered with... a free Linkin Park concert. You just got totally outclassed."

In the days that followed I jumped into life in Taiwan and my wheels found some traction. I'm not saying I never struggled again, far from it, but it was different after that night. I just needed that little push from God at that critical moment, to remind me that He loved me personally, and was there, and would intervene when necessary, in unexpected ways.