Day 5 - 7/2/2019 - By the Love of God

Matthew 7:7-8 "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."


Hi everybody! Adam here writing my first blog post for this year’s Taiwan STM. Before I dive into today’s events, I want to thank everyone who has been following our mission. One of my biggest weaknesses is that I can get easily stressed, so your prayers and support means as much as the world to me as it does to the rest of the team. Thank you so so much for staying by our side even across the globe; we couldn’t ask for a better group of brothers and sisters in Christ to share this mission with.

Also, I’d like to share one of my thoughts from the weeks/months going into the mission – just to give a clearer picture of our team dynamic.

After learning that I would be one of the "leaders" this year, I felt pretty burdened. Losing last year's strong, experienced leadership, I wasn’t sure how our team could be as successful as the previous year was in producing good fruit. However, a relatively simple but necessary truth I’ve been reminded of over these past few weeks – especially after selecting our new members for this year’s mission (and with Nicole’s blog) – is that God doesn’t call the qualified, but rather he qualifies the called. We need not expect to be perfect entering the mission field because as sinful beings, we are finite. The beautiful part, though, is that even with our finitude, God can still use us in ways we can’t even imagine. This, in turn, should encourage us to love each other no matter how broken we may think we are, and encourage us it did! As a team, we recognized that as long as we tune our hearts to Christ and Christ alone, God would provide unity. I’m thankful that God showed us this before going to Taiwan, and it is my prayer that we strive to build each other up each and every day because of how powerful God’s love is.

Now onto today. Before heading off to the church, we started the day with a morning devotion. Matthew 7 was a good reminder of how God listens to His people, and that if we persevered and trusted Him to be our rock, He would provide. Then, like yesterday, we arrived at church around 8am to start setting up for VBS day 2. It’s such an amazing feeling to be greeted by the Taiwanese youth, with their smiles and joyful, excited spirits. Although I was tired (still jetlagged!), I started to feel energized and ready to serve the kids.

Instead of the Taiwanese youth performing a play, we started today’s program with some icebreaker-style games. Afterwards, we danced along as the Taiwanese youth led body worship. Just like yesterday, we had a blast singing and dancing along regardless of how much of the Chinese lyrics we actually understood. Praise God for how He transcends boundaries such as language barriers.

Next, after a quick snack break, Nicole, Angela, and Penny told today’s bible story about Esther. They synergized really well and I enjoyed how interactive and enthusiastic they were.

(left to right) Penny, Nicole, and Angela telling their Bible story

Then came probably the hardest part of the day for us – leading the English lesson. Each English lesson group is split up by grade, so each group has its own unique challenges. At the same time, we had to account for each group’s English ability, but we quickly adapted after yesterday’s English lesson. It was pretty astonishing to find that across all grade levels, the kids were very obedient. Although each classroom had a few small problems here and there, we all agreed that the lesson plans – which consisted of a review of vocabulary words learned from the morning, an activity, the wordless book, and a Bible verse – were running pretty smoothly and that there were no major obstacles. I remember some of us feeling quite overwhelmed last year after the first couple of days because of how taxing the English lessons were. But this year, even our new members (Nicole, Angela, and Matt) have voiced how smoothly everything is going. God was truly watching over us.

After lunch and nap time, we led English body worship like yesterday and then one of the adult guests led a fun, interactive activity. He had us maneuver our bodies in different, sometimes unnatural positions, and we would have to guess what kind of person in real life would move like that. From there, we dressed our kids up in newspapers and scraps and competed to see whose costumes were the coolest. Our group dressed up one kid (his name is Charlie, looks kind of like Matt) as a gangster, and he rocked it pretty hard.

The kids showing off their costumes.

And just like yesterday, the last activity of the day was to practice the plays. We concluded the VBS with a meeting discussing how the day went, and then we went to an amazing hot pot restaurant (the same one as last year!). And with that, the day was pretty much over.

Us eating some hot pot. Delicious.

Right now, sitting on the couch writing this blog, I'm tired. I'm so tired. While last year I had a week before Taiwan at China to adjust to the jetlag, this year we went straight to Taiwan so I'm still fighting my internal clock. Each day has felt like a mental battleground, a nagging struggle to merely have enough energy to serve the kids and help the youth. But as you can probably sense from our blogs, it's a battle that is so easily overcome with the power and grace of God. Being among such a loving group of brothers and sisters, I feel confident. It doesn't matter how tired I may feel at any given time of the day. It doesn't matter that there's so much to do. As long as I am surrounded by the love of God and His people, as long as we seek to serve His kingdom, the door will be opened for us and His work will be done. Praise the Lord!

Prayer Requests:

• That God would continue to provide us with energy to serve the kids for the rest of the week
• For the kids to have receiving hearts
• That we may continue to love each other through God