This week I built relationships with some very unlikely characters. First came my sweet foreign coworkers who are living here for the summer through a program with their school in China.
Last week we took them all bowling. It was a hodge-podge group for sure, but it turned out to be one of the best nights of my summer thus far. One girl in particular has stolen my heart. Nikki is an English major back in China, and she desires to be a translator someday so her English is pretty well developed. She stands about 4’ll but has a smile that makes up for her small stature. That night we bonded over our horrid bowling abilities, had numerous girly bursts of laughter, and whispered about her small crush on one of the boys in her program. Then, a Buddhist bracelet she had given me as a gift brought up a conversation about my faith, which snowballed into a fervent interrogation where she asked me question after question. I gave her some verses to go home and find on the internet, and we promised to continue our conversation as soon as possible.
Now fast forward to Sunday evening at our Beach Project Co-worker Picnic. Nikki was thrilled to be there, and finally she brought up the verses she’d read, and admitted that while she understood what they said she felt she needed a real life example to truly grasp their meaning. At that exact moment my friend Josh got up to share his testimony, and Nikki listened with rapt attention.
Afterwards, she turned to me with tears in her eyes. In her soft-spoken voice she told me she just wanted to go back to China and tell everyone she knew about this love, but that she needed to figure out how she could be a Christian first. I was so overwhelmed and hardly knew what to say, but we talked a bit more and then decided she would really think about the weight of that decision over the next few days and we’d meet together Wednesday night.
I’m desperately praying for the Lord to call Nikki to Him. Her questions and searching are such an encouragement, and I’d ask everyone pray for my darling new Chinese best friend as she searches for God’s love and gets closer to making the decision to follow Christ.
My new friends aren’t isolated to the Eastern Hemisphere. I also had the pleasure of chatting with a cheerful man named Richard for the good part of an hour this week. He is a pretty regular customer at the Golden Arches and we got to have some discussion about God and the sinner’s in the church. Richard is an agnostic, and he was pretty open about how the negative experiences he’s had with members of the church caused him to turn against it. Richard definitely gave me a chance to brush up on the old debate skills, but we parted as friends and I can’t wait to run into him again. My prayers are also with Richard this week; I ache for him to see that as hateful as church members have been towards him God is that much and even more loving.
Pray that I will be bold in my faith in all my conversations with these unlikely friends. And Wednesday Nikki is teaching me to cook some traditional Chinese recipes… So pray I don’t poison us in the process.
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