Christians: Prisms, and Space Probes

Prisms

Let's start with prisms.
Have you ever seen how a glass prism splits and reflects the light that passes through it? Most of you probably have, in science class or on that Pink Floyd album cover if nowhere else.

That's right. I am using this for an illustration of our life in Christ.
1 Cor 9:22 all the way.

Like a mirror, the prism doesn't generate its own light. It takes the light it receives and reflects/refracts it out into the space around itself.

Actually the Pink Floyd triangular prism example above is about as simple as it gets. Anyone who's seen cut crystal for things like fancy light fixtures knows that the more facets a prism has, the more light it reflects in more directions. There's a reason diamonds are elaborately faceted into what's called a "brilliant" cut.

And if you are truly seeking to follow God, you will not feel like you're being gently sanded into a smooth sphere; you will feel like He is cutting pieces off of you. Smooth spheres might have a certain inner luminescence, but they don't reflect the light like multifaceted gems, don't send it shooting out in rainbow sparks. The gemstone must "suffer," must be cracked and fractured, to assume that kind of final brilliant form.

This is not a diamond commercial. Do your research, some are "blood diamonds" indeed.

The more we are shaped by God, the more we reflect the light of truth from Him to those around us. Yes, we do not merely passively shine; there is effort involved, but if we are not mature in our faith, if we have not sought out God to be in His presence, we are not going to put forth His light as we could, because we are simply not the right shape to do so. We must undergo fruitful suffering, to let the gemcutter grind new facets that will reflect His glory in new ways.


Note: Missionaries

So if believers are like prisms that reflect/refract the light they receive all around them, missionaries are simply prisms that have been placed far away, in places that may be quite dark. Imagine a fine cut gem* in a coal mine. Shine a light on it, and the effect is dramatic in the total darkness. Yet we cannot do anything to the coal, we can only keep reflecting our Lord's light; it is He alone who can exert the infinite Divine pressure to convert the coal into the rough diamonds for whom the cutting and polishing process can begin as it once began for us. (*- You can immediately see a problem with sending immature believers to the mission field...)

Left by itself in the coal mine, however, the jewel's reflective surface will quickly be coated by coal dust and stop reflecting light. In a nutshell, this is why missionaries need your prayer so much. It's not business as usual; we're not only in a darker spiritual environment, but being here tends to slowly dim our reflectiveness too. We need to be covered in prayer so that the coal dust doesn't stick to us and obscure our light, especially when the enemy is slinging it at us.

Space Probes

A prism doesn't only reflect more light by having more facets, of course. It also depends on how it's oriented with respect to the light it is receiving. (If you have ever played with a prism, or a dangling bit of chandelier or light fixture, you will no doubt have noticed that turning it at different angles towards the light changes how the light is reflected)

So orientation to the light is important, especially as we have "not yet been perfected" and are still undergoing sanctification. Our reflection is still partial and unbalanced; we need to stay rightly oriented to God for our light to shine effectively.

When discussing a craft in flight, especially space flight, one can speak of altitude but also attitude. Attitude in this context refers to the orientation of the craft with respect to some other frame of reference. (It could be the orientation of a space probe with respect to the mysterious planet it circles, or to an inertial frame of reference, etc.)

Bad image quality, but you get the idea.

Without the right attitude, an accelerating spacecraft orbiting, say, the Earth, will soon leave its proper orbit. It might dip too low, begin coasting through the Earth's outer atmosphere, and be dragged down, burning up in an unplanned, fiery re-entry. Conversely, it could swing too wide, begin to escape the earth's gravitational field, and head out into deep space.

Believers are no different. Without the right attitude -without the right orientation towards God- our effort will not result in productive progress for the Kingdom. We might sink lower and lower and burn out, or raise our opinion of ourselves higher and higher and grow distant from Him. In fact, with the wrong attitude, the more effort we put in, the faster we move in the wrong direction.

This is why ministry progress is a dangerous and misleading focus for Christians. Our focus must always be God. He is our frame of reference. If we are rightly oriented with Him, our efforts will progress in the right direction, in fact that's all they can do. On the other hand, if we aren't, all our efforts only take us further from where we need to be. It might look good at first; sometimes an orbit decays slowly. But sooner or later, without an attitude adjustment, we stray. God then graciously allows us to be zinged by a mini space rock at thousands of miles per hour, which hurts and confuses us, but has the effect of knocking us closer to our proper orbit around Christ.

Summary

 

So, what's the point of these two little analogies? Just two ways of thinking about our Christian lives.

First, in order to reflect the light of God's truth to those around us, we need to be in the right shape. This involves fruitful suffering, as Paul talks about in 2 Timothy, to chip pieces off until we are like a brilliant gemstone that does not merely receive the light but reflects it back into whatever context God places us in.

Second, if we don't maintain the right attitude to God, our eternal frame of reference, not only will we not reflect Him as strongly as we could, but our "progress" in ministry will, slowly or quickly, be leading us in the wrong direction. We need to constantly reorient ourselves with respect to God, through His word and time seeking out His presence, to make sure our orbit isn't decaying, leading us spinning out into the depths of space or crashing in flames down to earth.

You don't want to be this kind of shooting star...
Actually, biblically speaking, falling stars are pretty
much always bad news in general

A Year of Missions in Taiwan - Part 1

In a few days, I'll have been in Taiwan a year, again. The experience of my first year here -seven years ago now- and this one have been radically different. In this post, Part 1 of my look back over the past year, I want to outline some of the differences between that first year, a 'long short-term' trip, and this one, my first of many years here as a long-term missionary, Lord willing. It's been harder than I expected, in many ways, but He is good, and we see Him at work in our midst every week.

My previous year in Taiwan vs. This Year:

1. The Sense of Distance

Thanksgiving 2007... An unknown sea lies ahead

That year: Last time I lived in Taiwan, I had the fascinating experience of a whole year in which I felt the "coolness" of living overseas, in a culture very different from my own. Tolkien once described someone as having wandered into the remote distance of a certain place, yet retaining that enjoyable feeling of remoteness even after what had been distant was now his surroundings. That's how the first year felt, even after the initial adjustment. It never stopped feeling exciting; there was a little thrill every time I went outside, like someone had put a filter on reality that upped the contrast on everything, or caffeinated the air.

Early 2014...  A mountain has been climbed... but there are more

This year: This time has been exactly the opposite, so consistently that I was quite surprised. I haven't gotten the deeply excited, travel-y feeling even when it would make sense to have it (visiting little towns up in the mountains and pounding rice to make mochi, watching the World Cup with a bunch of other people at 3AM in a McDonalds in Kaohsiung, painting a paper lantern with Chinese characters and sending it up during the lantern festival, etc). I even wanted to make it happen sometimes, trying to close my eyes and get the feeling back, to help with the cultural adjustment. But other than a few brief moments (a dusty, late summer sunset over Taichung, a lone dragon kite on a rain-misting afternoon by the sea, white egrets in an emerald rice field glimpsed from a train window...), Taiwan has refused to seem anything but a perfectly normal place on planet earth in which I currently happen to be, which is in many ways much stranger than the opposite feeling. I don't have a good explanation for it, but I'd love to hear from anyone with a similar experience. (For some reason, I have the strong impression that passing the one year mark will make a difference, perhaps by making it undeniable that I'm moving into new territory in my Taiwan experience, despite the fact that this is already constantly true. The mind is a tricky thing.)

But when those moments do happen...

2. The Human Element

That year: My organization had an office in Taipei, I lived in my organization's housing in the middle of Taipei, and participated in a few different ministries with other missionaries, both long-term with my organization and other foreign teachers there for the medium or shorter term. I hung out with mostly expats in Taipei (foreign teachers and missionaries), but spent a great summer with my local friends down in Taichung doing evangelical summer camps, and by the time I left had a number of local friends in Taipei as well. It was pretty awesome.

This year: This has been the hardest thing, hands down. Both the organizational office and housing got sold a couple years back for reasons unnecessary to delve into, and no one else in my organization is up here anymore. Of the fun cross-organizational church-planting team that was here when I arrived a year ago, all the non-Taiwanese members have returned to America for varying reasons, and I'm the only foreigner left. (I'm single, so it's just me here) I definitely am blessed to have Taiwanese coworkers with whom I share "one heart and mind" in the Lord, but they are of my parents' generation and also not able to understand what it's like to live and adjust cross-culturally. I also discovered my friends in Taipei were 6 years further along in their lives, a few had moved abroad, and most didn't see each other often anymore. On the other hand, I have been very encouraged to find a few Taipei friends from before were excited to see me again, and to have made a few new friends here as well. But as it happens, all those friends, both old and new, are non-believers. It seems that, once we have a social circle at church, we stay inside it. I've been pondering this phenomenon and thinking it might be a crucial part of the reason we find it so hard to evangelize. (I could, of course, go to a church to meet Christians, but since I'm working on planting one, I don't have Sundays available to do that.)

So having lost both the expat and local relationship networks this time, working missionary hours (because when your work involves people attending optional activities, you are busiest when people are free and most free when they are busiest), and investing most of my time in lower-income community outreach and ministries that involve mostly young children and retired/elderly people, it's been a rough slog, relationally speaking. It's easy to say "go get plugged into new social groups, find churches that meet on other days than Sunday, etc." but hard to do so when you're an introvert and have invested most of your social energy in your outreach ministries, and also when you don't know at least one person in that group who can introduce you to the others, or even one person to go there with you. "Hey tonight let's go check out that group..." is very different than "Hm, do I want to be the random new guy tonight?" Not when I'm exhausted, no. Some coffee and a book, please, so recovery can start... not for socializing, but for the next day of ministry.

(If this section sounds like complaining, it's not meant to be; especially I want to emphasize that it's no one's fault. A wide range of factors all contributed to my current situation, and it will improve over time. It's just been especially difficult for this ending-of-the-beginning stage.)

3. The Work

That Year: Having quit my job as a computer engineer for the year of ministry in Taiwan, I still found a use for my skills in doing some work on the office computers. I participated in several English club programs, helped out at a local church, did a summer and winter VBS and eventually started an English Bible study there, and spent the entire summer working at evangelical summer camps.


This Year: Having recently graduated from a fairly well-known seminary, I receive a certain amount of respect here for having those credentials but I have not yet been able to use most of what I learned there. (It's ok, those kinds of opportunities will steadily increase if God chooses to prosper our church planting efforts here.) But we've done summer camps and VBSs and Bible studies, and we teach English in after-school classes and Bible stories and music classes to community kids and parents. I continue to meet with friends and students fairly often for English/Mandarin practice (with those conversations tending to be fruitful ones), and we've recently started a weekly house church meeting.

Being able to speak some Mandarin makes a huge difference this time, letting me jump into ministry right away. I still can't preach in it (I could "share," or spend a very long time writing a sermon and then read it from the pulpit, but I can't preach a full length sermon off of main points yet), but I can pray in Chinese now, and my current level lets me have lots of conversations (sometimes fairly deep ones) and be able to teach people who need everything except the exact English phrase or word being studied to be in Chinese, which is really helpful.

To use the common analogy, we've done lots and lots of seed-planting and lately some watering, and we trust that God will do with that as He wills, and we'll be able to see more fruit in time. The mission field is a long-term game, really a multi-generational one (whether you realize it or not, which is the scary part; everything you do has long-term consequences one way or another). We've also received a couple of short term teams who had great servant-minded attitudes and worked hard, which was as always very tiring for us as the receiving missionaries but fruitful as well, and our endeavor was blessed by the good work they did.


4. The Ministry Struggles


That Year: Language was a big struggle then, because without a translator I couldn't talk to anyone who didn't have at least some English, and definitely had to stick to English for any actual teaching or ministry. This meant I often struggled just to understand what was going on (A language barrier can be surprisingly easy to overcome when communicating one-on-one, but is more like a language cliff when lots of things are going on around you at the same time and you need to know what some of them are). Sometimes I struggled to understand what the Taiwanese people I worked with were thinking and expecting, and experienced some frustration both when I met with unexpected difficulties and when people seemed to expect me to know what they were thinking. It took time to learn that local people and even coworkers, unless they have spent some time as a cultural outsider in a new place themselves, can't really empathize with your difficulties in acting "normal" and communicating effectively. We might laugh at the unenlightened soul back home who says "why can't they just speak English like normal people," but people in other cultures don't necessarily think much differently. (This time in Taiwan I've had a number of people express surprise that I was a different kind of person than they thought I was. It turns out some of them hadn't realized I didn't talk about certain things because I didn't know how to do so in Chinese; they just assumed I never thought about those things or wasn't interested in them.)

This Year: Being on a church-plant opportunity, we continually seek to figure out the needs in our community and meet them as a testimony to the gospel and a demonstration of God's love. This area has barely been touched by the gospel, and while a few small churches exist on its outskirts, once you leave the main road it's only shrines and little temples inside the neighborhoods. There is poverty, not desperate but real. We recently discovered some kids that attend our community English class hadn't been eating lunch before doing so. One girl's parents are a man who lost an arm in an accident and now sorts trash for a living, and the wife he got from Vietnam. The daughter has a serious learning disability. She always sweetly shares her food with the other kids. Some of these people are just barely getting by. Some are not so badly off, by comparison, and comment that our English classes are too easy for them/their kids. Our classes are a mix of white and blue collar, working and middle class, kids who attend specialty school after school to get a headstart on their college exam, 12 years early, and kids who run around the neighborhood unattended after school because their single parents can't be away from work to watch them.

I have years of education in logic and apologetics, and a mind that is naturally equipped for critical and analytical thinking. I am not being boastful but simply stating a fact when I say that most of my friends and family would advise against trying to argue a point with me. And, those abilities don't go very far in this community, in this kind of work. That's not to say that logic and apologetics are not valuable, they certainly are, and have been helpful when I've had the chance to share the gospel with college students. But it's become clear that in a sense I've been trained as a world class sniper when what's wanted here is hand-to-hand combat in the trenches. A lot of humility comes with the realization those loving, but odd, and not very bright people that you once struggled not to look down on as an immature young Christian might run circles around you when it comes to being Christ to struggling people.

After grad school/seminary I could parse New Testament passages in the original Greek and explain the difference between nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive languages. In some of our outreach ministry, I am inclined to think someone who was good at hand puppets and doing silly voices would be vastly more useful. Yet God works through our weaknesses, even weakness we had in other contexts pridefully assumed was strength.


5. The Cultural Adjustment

2007... What -is- this?
Trying a new food with my Taiwanese friend Carol
('a-gae', in Danshui)

That Year: I'd done three short-term trips to Taiwan, so it wasn't a totally new experience coming to Taiwan, but living here certainly was. I still remember my first trip to the drugstore, my exploratory trips to local restaurants, etc. (I get a bit nostalgic thinking about how everything was an exciting adventure.)

I had a bit of culture shock, and was a bit homesick for the holidays (though I haven't ever experienced the really severe homesickness that some people do; we moved a lot growing up so I don't have any one particular place that is obviously home, and missing my family tends to be heavily mixed with gratitude for having a loving family to miss), but Taiwan is a fun and interesting place for a young person to live, and I enjoyed the process more than I got stressed out from it. It was the reverse culture shock that hit me going home that came as a real surprise and took some time to get over.


This Year: I had sort of assumed that, having lived here a year before, I wouldn't have culture shock this time. In general that was actually true. I wasn't surprised by much I encountered, was actually looking forward to the food that scares a lot of short-termers, etc. What I've found though, is that what we call culture shock is really a combination of a number of things. Some of it is displacement shock, which you get moving to any new place, and some of it is what I call "life" shock. Things happen to make you realize your life isn't how it used to be, and those kinds of changes can be unpleasant. Now I did have some culture shock this time too, mostly having to do with being immersed in the culture to a much greater extent than I was last time, and being in a different community. I can't recall getting a lot of frowning stares living in the middle of Taipei city, near a major university, but I get them in this community fairly often, that sort of thing.

But, for example, as I mentioned above, it wasn't that my friends spoke a different language from me (I could muddle along in it reasonably well by the time I got back here), and I already knew they'd use different -ways- of communicating (a deeper difference than simply using different-sounding words), but I wasn't thinking of the fact that 6 years for me had passed for them too. Upon arriving, I spent a confused month or two before rapidly discovering, to my disappointment but begrudging understanding, that things were "different now," "not like before," etc. (I don't believe any human being enjoys that realization, but denial only hurts yourself. In this world we will have trouble, but Christ has given us His peace, and not as the world gives.)

2014... I think I know what this is...
Trying a new flavor with the same friend Carol...
in the brownie shop she's now opened 7 years later

So here I can offer a bit of advice* to outgoing/new missionaries, which is: don't confuse all the 'shock' you experience for culture shock. That can lead to resenting the culture, which can cause all kinds of problems in both the short and long term, and greatly inhibit the depth of your ministry. So much of the discomfort is simply displacement shock- moving to an unfamiliar place, losing your relationship networks, encountering weird people (it's hard when you don't know the culture yet, but sometimes it really isn't your lack of cultural flexibility, they're just an odd person), going through legal processes that are hard no matter where you are, etc. And sometimes, as I found, life can shock us all on its own.

(*- Offering advice is always a risky business, but I'll try to do my best at providing some for new missionaries in the second part of my reflections on this year in Taiwan, coming soon.)
PART 2 >

Half a Year in Taiwan - Some Serious Thoughts

As of 4 days ago, I marked 6 months of long-term service here. It's been an interesting time, with some surprising struggles, and unexpected encouragements.

Since in about a week I will be busy and travelling for summer camps until sometime in the latter half of July, this week seems like a good chance to reflect on lessons I've learned and am learning.

 

Reflections on these six months...

 

1. Expectations might be your enemy, but you can't ever quite succeed in not having them.

I tried not too have too many expectations coming back to Taiwan, but the very experience that made it a more feasible task to swap continents, lifestyles, and environments also inevitably meant that I would have some expectations based on that experience. Much of the experience that gave rise to those expectations was valuable, crucial even, to working effectively here this time, but the hardest thing coming back has been the frustration of some of those expectations.

I imagine most of you know what culture shock is; well reverse culture shock is the (often unexpected, and sometimes more difficult) shock one experiences when returning to one's home culture and realizing that your perspective has been changed as a result of your experiences in a new culture, and that you now view your home culture in a slightly different way. Sometimes your eyes are opened to negative things you never noticed before, sometimes your priorities have simply be rearranged, but either way it can be difficult to experience and nearly impossible for anyone who hasn't experienced it themselves to sympathize with you.

The blessing of my prior experience of living in Taiwan for a year affected my coming here this time in nearly every possible way, basically letting me hit the ground running. I was actively doing ministry within a few days of arriving while my brain was doing overtime trying to get used to being in constant Chinese mode. At the same time I was caught unprepared for the painful realization that Taiwan, and more specifically my acquaintances in Taiwan, had not been static and unchanging in the 5+ years in between last time I lived here and now. Kids who were in middle school my first few trips to Taiwan, and only early highschool when I lived here that year, are now getting into their early 20's. Being still in my 20's until next year, that means we're all in our 20's together, which is fun and meaningful in some ways and rather odd at the same time!

At the same time, old friends have moved on with their lives, with those fundamental changes that creep in between your mid 20's and your late 20's. I discovered some friendships have survived, many haven't, and the warmth with which I was welcomed back to Taiwan before my actual arrival turned out to be more or less unrelated to the eagerness of the welcomers to actually meet with me once I was here. Some former acquaintances are now friends, some friends are now more like old acquaintances, and I find myself not starting with anything like the social circle I thought I had coming in.

You could call it reverse-reverse culture shock, perhaps; learning to dodge the jab of culture shock only to be hit with a left hook when moving back into reach of the same culture again. But I think a more accurate term would be simply time shock; regardless of culture, it hits all of us sooner or later.

2. Yes I Still Love Taiwan!

The process of getting over here nearly gave me ulcers again. ("Let go and let God" sounds lovely and serene, but my experience is more like "Hold on tight and ask God to keep your fingers from getting broken if this thing comes to a quick stop") Having finally made it, though, it is such a tremendous blessing to have been given a love for the place to which you are called. And love is the right term, because the like gets stretched at times, but in the end I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

My work here is varied; I am not just here to "do ministry," though there's plenty of that, I am here to be a living representative of Christ. That calling leads to everything from teaching songs to 2nd graders and English to 80+ year old seniors using DIY bingo cards, to having late night Skype meetings with American short-term mission teams because of the time difference, to discussing concepts of Christianity and Taiwanese culture in mandarin with my young professional friends in elaborately-ambianced cafes, to turning the tables on pairs of Mormon missionaries and witnessing to them instead.

I'm not sure where Taiwan lies on the scale of comfort in terms of mission fields. It's really a false question because how comfortable you are depends on a lot of factors, and the overall environment and modernity of your surroundings is merely one of those. One could get along quite happily with a great ministry team planting churches in jungles, slums, or even a city dump, or push through day after discouraging day with no visible progress in your lonely coffee shop gospel outreach in a posh, comfortable neighborhood of a global city.
For my part, I tend to feel lucky that I get to live here. Sometimes when a short term team visits, though, I'm reminded that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for the details of life here. Living in Taiwan comes with all the benefits and drawbacks of living in/right next to the tropics:

There's intense humidity (hanging one's clothes out to dry may result in their mildewing instead), the insect life is diversely sized and numerous (from air-thickening mosquitoes to flying cockroaches to spiders that are like skinny tarantulas), nothing lasts more than a couple of hours without being refrigerated, garbage disposal becomes a serious endeavor that requires planning and multiple types of garbage bags, one is typically soaked in either rain or sweat within 90 seconds of going out the front door, I could go on. Most expats actually flee Taiwan after the school year ends to spend the relentlessly muggy summer elsewhere.

On the other hand one can drink inexpensive fresh papaya milk between waving palm trees under a glowing blue sky and feel that all that is not so bad. And since it's Taiwan, you might just as easily be doing that in front of a 3-story, Times Square-style LED billboard that's advertising cough syrup with Chinese medicinal herbs, or next to a quaint country train station built in the old Japanese colonial style with summer breezes playing through the flooded rice fields. There could be a garbage truck playing Fur Elise, or a guy beatboxing Mario bros. across from the barbecued squid stand.

Really, you never know what you'll see...

A Rubber Ducky bigger than a Starbucks floating in the harbor? Yeah, you might see that.

3. Things Never Stop Changing Anywhere in the World.

Taiwan in 2014 is a little more tired, a little less affluent. Taiwan's overall cultural worldview is even more heavily centered around almighty Success than America's is, so the lack of it (worse, due to global economic conditions and Taiwan's rather unique situation, the creeping realization of the inevitable future lack of it) affects people and society in general here even more deeply.

So the "cheerfulness" factor in general is noticeably down for someone who's only been back on a few short trips between 2008 and the end of last year. The glory days were just ending then, and there was happy inertia. Not so much now.
Of course all this is compared to the 'Taiwanese miracle' days of being one of the 4 Asian Tiger economies. So having come down several notches from that doesn't qualify as "hard times" yet here, but it's harder than many students now have ever known. Up until the middle of that decade people had been throwing out old stuff and buying new, now they're holding onto what was new in 2008 and it's not so shiny anymore. Graduating students don't find jobs waiting for them. It's a similar situation to what America faces now, really, except America has far more power, resources, and potential options.Taiwan is in a difficult political situation, and their friends are few and not willing to challenge China. In the past, the US was a guarantee that China would not unilaterally move to change the situation, but nowadays that's looking less and less like a surety.

Of course, while obviously no one enjoys a decline in prosperity, we have to ask the most important question: What does this mean for the gospel in Taiwan?
Honestly, it will probably result in people being more open to listen. People accuse Christianity of being a crutch for the weak, but it's far more the case that success is a crutch for the mortal; a means to pretend to control his own fate. Once the idols one worshipped in exchange for hope of worldly success seem ineffective, people will be more willing to listen to those who claim there is a God whose hope is not of this world. (They'll also be less willing to tolerate missionaries who don't seem to be contributing to Taiwan's economy, so we'll see how that situation progresses.)

4. I Need More of God

I am increasingly aware that my own relationship to God is more relaxed than fervent. The focus in American Evangelicalism on sound Biblical doctrine is very important, but it should serve as the rails on which our train runs, not the station we're headed to. God seeks to know us, and our path in life is to walk with Him, not only have very scripturally sound ideas about Him.

My time in seminary was glorious and blessed, but my lifestyle over those 3+ years was totally exhausting physically, mentally, and spiritually. My faith was strengthened and not weakened, praise God, by the fearless and intimate look at His word "behind the scenes" that my seminary offered. It was not confusion and dismay at some of the Sunday School Answers being challenged so much as relief that for some topics there were more complicated and grown-up answers that were much more satisfactory while not challenging scriptural authority whatsoever. (Sometimes the original text even leaves room for more than one interpretation! What a relief to find that we can disagree with each other on non-doctrine level questions and still all be equally convinced of the truth of Scripture.)

But by the time it was over, I needed rest and recovery. The time in Alabama was mostly an unstable "between time," with several months of "oh, you're still here?" It was valuable time spent with family and old friends, which I am grateful for, but also stressful in that I was neither here nor there.

After finally arriving in Taiwan and after the initial few months of transition, my life began to assume some kind of normal routine. I began to realize the lack of normal routine or stable life situation had seriously affected my daily walk. I'd been praying and working through so many big, one-time issues both as I left the US and upon arriving here that I'd gotten entirely out of the habit of setting aside daily time with God.

In America that's wrong, it's spiritual laziness, and being actively involved in church isn't sufficient to make up for it.
But Taiwan is not America. This is not Christendom, and never was; idolatry has never been seriously challenged until these few decades, and the real breakthrough hasn't happened yet. Here, under spiritual warfare and without a consistent church home, trying to plant a church in a spiritually resistant community where no steeples rise but the chimneys of many daoist sacrificial furnaces do, where the air is often thick with the smoke of burnt paper money and joss incense, what was detrimental to my spiritual health in the US is here an imminent danger.

(By way of analogy, imagine back when they had the smoking sections and non-smoking sections in restaurants. Sure, you could still smell dangerous second-hand smoke sometimes drifting over from the smoking section, but spiritually speaking this is like sitting at the table full of people smoking)

So if I don't hold onto time in God's presence on a personal level, actively seeking after Him, I will be dragged away from Him. Not from salvation, the enemy can't touch that. But your spiritual health can be chipped away bit by bit, and here I see how that can happen. Missionaries need your prayer for more than just the success of their ministry, when they go into the enemy's territory with the gospel they get the enemy's poisonous attention.

Sacrificial pig on display during Ghost Month, a plea to ancestral spirits to not harass the living

 

5. Taiwan Needs Prayer, More Than Ever Before

Even without this special kind of spiritual pressure, being on the mission field our reliance on God is made more obvious. I submit that this should not only be the case on the mission field, but it can be more difficult to leave our comfort zone when it's the default and you have to work to get out of it, whereas on the mission field being out of your comfort zone is the default and you have to work to fine one, if it's even possible.

In any case, we pray a lot! We know that any success in this kind of spiritual endeavor (and in the face of this warfare) will come through God's work, not our plans. We are all ambassadors for Christ here, and that role is made glaringly obvious in a land where most people's reaction to Christ is neither acceptance nor denial, but a shrug. He's great for you westerners, but what has He go to do with Taiwanese?

Missionaries have been in Taiwan for a long time, but the gospel has only reached certain sections of the population. The church that does exist cannot be described as consistently healthy either. I've noticed that some people think that while the church in America is sometimes sadly described as a mile wide and an inch deep, in countries with only a small church presence it must be the opposite; small gatherings of passionate and fearless believers. Taiwan is more or less neither, to be honest. In terms of Protestant Christians, there are a few dozen very large churches on the island, several thousand in total (most having fewer than 50 people on an island of 23 million people), and most of them are similar to American churches. People come on Sunday, maybe participate in a weekday night service or maybe not, and in small churches the "80-20 rule" (80% of the work done by 20% of the church) might even be more like 90-10. Or frighteningly often, only the pastor, because he's the "professional Christian," and it's his job to do the spiritual stuff, right?

I have noticed even more strongly this time living here that the prosperity gospel is also rampant in Taiwan. Joel Osteen is in literally almost every church bookstore. When you worship idols, it's a very natural transition. Idols (and the gods they represent) don't love you, but they can help you get stuff you want if you worship them. How much better to change your allegiance from a bunch of small gods to one big God who loves you -and- will help you get the stuff you want if you worship Him?

Please continue to pray for Taiwan.

6. Seeking My Place in Taiwan

"Doing" ministry in Taiwan is not always easy but it at least consists of relatively clearly defined tasks with goals you can write down. "Being" in Taiwan is what has presented me with the most difficulties so far, and it's something I want to work on. Who am I, here?

As a westerner in Taiwan, I'm not under any illusions that I'll ever be Taiwanese in the strict sense. If I spoke absolutely fluent and brilliant Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Hakka too, was a Taiwanese citizen, wrote famous historical novels about Taiwan in Chinese, had a seat in the Taiwanese legislature, whatever.. to a random person on the street I would be a white tourist. That's just how it is.

In a way, though, that takes some pressure off. If I was in Germany, say, for lifelong ministry, I might be tempted to set the goal to basically become German. This would be impossible in one sense (I didn't and now can never grow up Germany), but it would seem much more attemptable, as being ethnically Northern European, after some years, in dress, posture, and maybe even language, it's conceivable that I could appear to be and come across as a native German. That's an extremely difficult thing to do, and arguably you lose out on some benefits that you bring to the table as a foreigner in terms of ministry. It also leads to interesting identity issues.

In Taiwan, since this is impossible, I don't have the temptation to try. I am not content, however, to remain solely on the sidelines. My goal is to be fluent in at least Mandarin, and find a place in Taiwan's society, an accepted role among my friends and acquaintances and coworkers, so I can have an identity here other than "guest who doesn't leave." Some have suggested that's impossible. Maybe so. At this stage I think it's too early to say, so I will forge ahead and see what happens. It's true that it would have been more of a feasible option had I gotten here 9 years ago and spent all my 20's here, making friends long before those friends started families. So I know I'm arriving late in the game, but it's also a game without clearly defined rules, so maybe I can write a few myself. Only time and God's providence will tell.

So please keep praying for me too; it's been a long road but my journey is only beginning...