The Party and Death

Today was an interesting day to say the least.

I'd been pretty discouraged being on campus the past few days because not much seems to be happening in the lives of most of the guys I've been meeting with. Several of the freshmen students I was excited about have crazy busy schedules and I basically won't be seeing them until mid-April and it's been hard to figure out what I should be doing when I step on campus.

But the Lord "threw me a bone" today and I had a really good conversation over lunch with a friend named Wise who I've already talked through the Gospel with a few times previous to this. To sum up the conversation, I asked toward the end what would keep him from being a Christian since he believed it and wanted to have a relationship with God. His answer after a few moments of silence, "Speaking truthfully, I will join the Party."

Oh.

But Wise gets it. He understands that faith is more important than success, or an organization, or money, and I highly anticipate that sometime within the next couple weeks if not days, Wise will enter into a relationship with the God of the universe.

After leaving the dining hall from eating with Wise, I walked outside to discover a small crowd gathered outside one of the buildings maybe 100 feet away and our team leader, Rebecca, standing away from the crowd a ways praying and texting people to do the same. One of the construction workers on campus was laying on the ground as some medical workers attempted CPR and a few guards blocked the area off. By the time I came outside, this had been going on for about 30 minutes. After about 45 minutes of hopelessly attempting CPR, they called it quits.
Rebecca and I thought we were well out of the way, but a few minutes later they carried the man right by us with a blanket half covering his body into a fenced off area on campus.

Besides being slightly confused and bewildered at the medical treatment he had received and their manner of dealing with his death, I couldn't help but think as they carried him past us that death is a strange thing.

I know there are probably people reading this who have jobs where they occasionally or frequently deal with death, but I can't think of another time off the top of my head that I'd seen something quite like this. It occurred to me that not 60 minutes earlier I had been talking to one of my friends at lunch about faith and the fragility of life, and this man was still alive going about his day. His situation had changed quite drastically as they carried his deceased body past us.

Disregarding how time does or doesn't work when you pass away, I imagined him in that moment probably learning a lot about eternity and a God that he'd maybe never even heard of but more than likely didn't believe in.

And I thought about how he didn't cease to exist even though his body had stopped working. Life is weird that way; death is strange. It's only the end of the beginning. Our bodies are kind of like a "rental" that we use for a very short while, never knowing how long they're going to last exactly, until we move on to what we were REALLY created for.

And then I thought about a lot of other random things like how our bodies are like cars and you never know if you got a reliable one that gets passed down from generation to generation or a Pinto, but I'll spare you all of those random thoughts.

No conclusion. No bow on top. That's my day.

CK

Hui le

He's back.

The man.

The legend.

Chicken man!!!

FINALLY, several weeks after most people returned to work after the holiday, the man we have affectionately named, "Chicken man," who runs, you guessed it, a chicken stand complete with chicken nuggets, fries, chicken on a stick, etc...is BACK!

We were genuinely concerned for his health and well-being after, night after night, we would check to see if he'd returned and nothing. But alas, I had a gut feeling the night before that he would be around the next day and BAM, there he was.

Needless to say, we feasted on chicken nuggets and fries for dinner tonight.

And now, all is well in East Asia.