The first week in East Asia was crazy. As a leader, I was responsible for handling everything with the campus, including paying for tuition and housing. Let me tell you, walking into an East Asian bank with thousands of US dollars to convert into the local currency is quite the experience. Now imagine that experience while not knowing the language and in a city where the people have literally never seen an American before…yeah, pretty much, it was insanity! But besides all the random behind-the-scenes stuff, the first week could not have gone better. Our fam was spread out everywhere across campus meeting students, some in the cafeterias, some on the sports fields, some in the shopping malls. The campus was huge and as a a result, we all bought bikes to get around.
Literally, I walked halfway around campus one time and it took 45 minutes! But everybody in our fam was starting to meet East Asian students and we all fell in love with them.
I met a guy named Fall on the ping pong courts that week. Literally, it was a gymnasium packed out with ping pong tables where all the coaching happened. It was pretty sweet! Topher (one of the guys in my fam who I discipled) and I got to meet up with Fall around ten times over the course of the summer. It started out by just hanging out with him, playing ping pong or enjoying meals, and progressed to spiritual conversation. Over those five weeks that we spent with him, we got to see him open up and really come to a place of recognizing how important of a decision we had laid before him. I don’t know where he is at now, but I know that God will continue working on his heart.
I guess that’s one of the biggest things that I learned this summer. My role has never been to see people change. Yet so many times, I measure whether or not I was successful based on this criteria of change. But what I realized is that when I look to this criteria to measure my success, I am doing an injustice to what God has called me to. You see, my only role is to give people the opportunity to change. God’s role is to work in their heart to produce the change. So if I saw that change happen…great! If not…great! Either way, I had accomplished what God had put before me to do. And so even though I left without knowing where Fall was at and whether or not God had produced the change in his heart, I know that he understands the option that is before him. And God is faithful, I can only be in prayer for Fall now.
