23 July, Color-Man, Shanghai

I had not yet left the Shanghai Pudong Airport to enter into the city when I suddenly grew excited about China. Even in the airport, I saw a thoroughly different world. Yet it is, in a strange way, compatible with Western culture in a way that the Middle East and India are not. It has a certain order and work ethic that is entirely its own.

My intrigue grows. This place indeed has a rich culture and history and language, to rival the West. It is full of opportunity and versatile to change. The people adapt quickly and work hard. In the mornings, you can find the streets filling with workers as early as five or six. They are on the move. I think that in the same way that it has been fresh ground for Western business, China is also fresh ground for the gospel to grow. This is a place to invest in spiritually. I want to learn its language and history. I want to learn how these people think.

My joy has also been restored for traveling. God has given me the kind of energy and zeal I had at the very start of this trip here at the end. We're on our own now for these last couple weeks, so I needed it. I've got back the desire to make the most of each remaining second of travel. Mark Twain reminds me in The Innocents Abroad that I will regret more the things I don't do than the things I do. What an opporunity we've been given! I will long for these days in the coming years. We will not let it grow old.

Yesterday, Ross, an American YWAMer in Kathmandu, told us something very important. We asked him how he dealt with Daal Baht twice a day, every day. "It's all grace," he said, "It's the grace of God that lets us sleep where we sleep and eat what we eat." He hasn't had a bed to call his own in a long time, yet he is content.

But now I am in a cozy hotel room with Western accomodations. Nepal is in my past; I'll no longer be dealing with Daal Baht and squatter toilets. Or will I go back? We must be ready in our minds to give up everything and follow where Jesus leads. I must be ready to go back to Nepal, or even to India. The best of the world is not enough to satisfy my desires, and the worst of the world cannot separate me from Jesus' love. Therefore I can be confident to live anywhere under His grace.

Drew

17 July, Action-Man, Pokhara, Nepal

Tonight, we returned to our hotel, took off our shoes at the door, propped our bamboo walking sticks against the wall and climbed the stairs to our room. My feet ache. What ails them? Six days of walking on rocks in the Himalayas. And it's a wonder, with continual moisture in my shoes, that I didn't get trench foot.

Our room is at the end of the hall on the upstais floor of Hotel Castle. Pokhara is a city full of tourists and hotels, but this hotel, begun by the first Christian in Pokhara, hosts only Christians. At the end of the hallway, as I shuffled to the door like a tired Himalayan ox, and unloaded my heavy rucksack, I saw an oil painting on the wall of Mount Machapucchre. It is a horned, mammoth mountain in the Annapurna range, north of Pokhara. I felt like an old, experienced mountainman, tired and finished with his adventures, gazing on the mighty mountains he fought against so hard, and in the end, prevailed.

The picture has green in the foreground--vegetation and trees, forests and rolling grass land, just like our mountains. At times, I felt like I was in the jungle, at times in a deciduous evergreen forest, or the dewy green of Ireland, as we tramped towards Annapurna Base Camp. We never crossed the snowline, which begins high above the clouds.

Today, we covered the same ground as on our first day. The river flowed beside us all the way back. At certain points, the cool air from the rushing water felt like a refrigerator door opening on my face, when clear drafts met us on the open banks. The villagers seem to have lost all wonder at Western trekkers. The village elders must think to themselves as we pass, "These people from these far countries have a strange desire to climb the highest mountains at all costs, even at the risk of their lives." And it's true, some daredevils never do come back. I read about one Russian, swept away by an avalanche, like the thirty villagers that died in the rock avalanche in Dolpa yesterday.

Today, I realized just how much some goats look like sheep and how much some men look like trees, walking with their heavy loads of corn stalks and brush. Look at Mark 8:24 and Jesus' miracle there, because it gives a good visual of the Himalayan porters and what the blind man saw when he opened his eyes. In our last hour of walking, we looked back once more and saw the mountains again, so high above everything else. I marvel at the power of God and his hand like a great antediluvian bulldozer pushing the land together. The Indian peninsula squeezed against Asia and the Himalayans reared their great shoulders. I remember in the Bible how the flood of water covered even the highest peaks by 15 cubits. Is it possible?

Sam