Read Chris B.’s short reflections on his recent short-term mission trip to Asia. Chris is a KCC member and is on staff with Cru serving various NW Ohio college campuses.
And now we wait
“Landing in Asia for the first time in my life, I felt overwhelmed with a sense of dread. Here I was, leading a group of 15 people into a county I had never been to, who spoke a language I couldn’t begin to comprehend. I only vaguely knew where we were going or what we would be doing. All this hit me as we were taxiing to our gate at the airport. “What have I done,” repeated over and over in my mind.
But we made it. Customs let us in, our friends met us and loaded us up into their vehicles, and we got into our hostel and airbnb. After a few hours of sleep, the dread began to shrink and the excitement started to grow.
In the city we were in, roughly 25,000 college students speak English, and while we didn’t meet all of them, we met a lot them. The local staff used our “American” identity to draw students who wanted to practice English (and meet Americans for probably the first time) through several events. We went bowling, hosted a seminar on honor/shame cultures vs guilt/innocence cultures, hosted an International Women’s Day party, and generally exhausted ourselves meeting as many people as we could, and getting phone numbers.
It feels strange to say, but we didn’t actually get to share the Gospel with many students that week, and that’s ok. There were a few Gospel conversations, but mostly we just made friends. In this part of the world, where the costs of following Jesus are high, it takes people a long time to decide to follow Him. So now that we’re back home, we wait. We pray for the students we connected to the local believers. And we dream about going back.” – Chris B.