1 August, Closing Thoughts

I've been gone a mere two months, but I am ready for home. I want to unpack my bag, stretch out my legs, open fresh drawers and fill them with crisp, clean clothes, folded by my mother. It's hot, hot summer now, and I anticipate the cooling fall, sweaters and studies, brisk nights outside under the waning sun. I long for hot chocolate chip cookies and a deep glass of milk, to sit and tell stories with my family in our living room.

I would admit that these longings come from a weak traveler's heart, but I think that any wanderer who has wandered at our pace across the globe would discover the same homesick feelings. In most respects, America is a better place to live than the rest of the world--better than Nepal and Israel, and yes, even Italy. From overseas, America is idyllic. The pleasures of life found in Nepal are mere shadows of the richness of America. I was raised in the land of treasures; if I'd been raised elsewhere I wouldn't know what I was missing.

We've been in lands of dirty water, bus wrecks, and leeches. We've left countries consumed in wars, ravaged by bombs, and shaken by deadly rockslides. We've passed hundreds of beggars and seen the faces of thousands of people needy for a Savior. Tragedies and misfortunes fill the streets of this world. My eyes have been opened to that; to shut them again when I return would be a dishonest deed.

If we died in this far-off land, would our longings for home die with us? If I died with this pack on my shoulders, having never tasted sweet home again, would I regret for a moment taking this journey? Would my love for family and friends vanish with me into the dust? Many, if they were honest about their religion, would have to say yes; all that matters for them is life here on earth.

But this earth is not our home. Hebrews says that Abraham and the saints died in faith "not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth." Though this is the picture of Christians throughout the Bible, I think many Christians today are afraid of it. We're afraid to let this world go.

We are God's children. Our homeland is heaven. If I were to die today, I would die happy. I'd die happy because my hopes do not rest in this world--in my travels or family or home or future. My hopes rest in the promises of Christ, the promises of a new heaven and a new earth--life with God.

C.S. Lewis called this world the shadowlands. The things which I long for back home are mere shadows of the things which I long for in heaven. Now, I see them from afar, making out dim shapes on the horizon. One day, as Paul says, I shall seem them in full, and run after them, further up and further in, without turning back. For, says, Hebrews, "If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city." Amen.

Drew

1 August, Closing Thoughts

Today is the end of a big, big chapter of my life. It is the end of the most important year of my short life. "Hitherto hath the Lord helped me." I am a different man than I was on August 1, 2005. I left for Mercy Ships in Africa on August 21 and I will arrive home on August 1. It has been almost a solid year away from home and I am ready to settle down.

I'm in Shanghai at our hotel. We love this hotel. Look at this hallway--carpeted, vacuumed, uncluttered, cool. Through a window I can hear the city. It woke up without me and it doesn't need me to operate. I always get nervous on departure days.

God has dealt well with me to give me this year of travel. Life is short. But today it's better to be alive than dead. "He who is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion." That's from Ecclesiastes, a book of the Bible that I really like. "All is vanity," Solomon says. ALL. One generation passes aways and another generation comes and there is no remembrance of former things. Do we take these words seriously? The memory of the dead is forgotten. Their love and hatred and their envy perishes. Our days are like a shadow. We could die today and somebody foolish could take our place. What is our life but a vapor?

"All flesh is like grass and all the glory of man like the flower of grass." The Bible is full of this stuff. David and Job would have prayed like this, "Lord, make me know my end and the measure of my days that I may know how frail I am."

So what now? I repeat Herman Melville: "This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet." It's true--Ecclesiastes is hard to swallow. But look at chapter 9:7-10. Those are some practical verses. All in all, take God seriously and don't forget him. Be humble with each other.

Sam

31 July, Action-Man, Shanghai

On the streets in Shanghai, as the proverb says, "The rich and the poor meet together." Beneath the glitzy lights and designer malls on Nanjing Road, the beggars still beg and the homeless pick through garbage. Rich families with fresh department store treasures stroll casually by the trash pickers. As always, the poor seek more money and better status in a thousand different ways. Hawkers sell trinkets and DVDs and rollerskate shoes. Shoeless kids stick their hands in your face and say, "Hello, money," as if it were your first name.

But others force me to pause. A man in the square has no arms. He sits with a coin cup between his feet and his head down. A lady on the subway stairs cradles a baby whose head is twice the size of mine. It stare coldly into space. An old hag, her face and hair torn apart by skin disease, waits in the alley shadows for someone to pass by and take notice. Why does God choose such lives for these people?

All of their faces are burned into my head. Even in Shanghai, this pinnacle city of modern civilization, not everyone is comfortable. Day by day, the destitute play out their game for one more meal. What sort of game are we playing?

Drew

Thoughts after Asia

Coming away from West Africa, I saw sure that unless a country is wholly devoted to God and the masses accept the gospel, there could be no peace or prosperity. I thought that if the Liberians would only teach and do exactly what the Bible says, their country would change. But this trip has reminded me that many of the richest countries in the world don't give a hoot about God.

"All things come alike to all," says Ecclesiastes, "there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked. One event happens to them all." Shanghai is a major city of the world, a central commercial emporium of the globe. But does the communist Chinese government care for God? Is Christianity a majority religion here? Nations and people can get rich without acknowledging God.

But on the other hand, what does the Bible say? Job 8:11 says, "Can papyrus grow where there is no marsh? Can reeds flourish where there is no water? While yet in flower and not cut down, they wither before any other plant. Such are the paths of all who forget God; the hope of the godless shall perish." And this morning Drew read Psalm 9:17, "The wicked shall return to Sheol, all the nations that forget God." And last night I read Hosea 4:1, "The LORD has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. There is no faihtfulness or steadfast love, and no knowledge of God in the land; there is swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and committing adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns, and all who dwell in it languish." Countries can get rich without acknowledging God. But can peace and prosperity last without God?

Sam

31 July, Action-Man, Shanghai, China

Just got back from breakfast downstairs. In the lobby was the old man from Australia. He was posing with the receptionist for a photo "You leaving today?" I asked him. "I'm leavin' now!" he answered. I can never tell if he's enjoying his vacation to China or not. "Going to Xi'an， then Beijing," he continued. "Well don't get too lonesome," I told him. "Oh no," his speech is so garbled that, at first glance, it sounds like he's speakin Chinese, "You go down this main street out here and all the ladies invite you for coffee. And they got other things up their sleeves, too."

Out hotel is north of downtown Shanghai and sits on the border of town, where English isn't spoken and the dirty streets are third-worldish. Air conditioners drip puddles on the sidewalks and drops land on your head and neck. The women wear big tinted visers. The old men roll up their pant legs and unbutton their shirts. Men and women dig deep in their throats for loogies and spit and snort. In the nooks and corners of the streets are diners where men chew their noodles and dumplings with sickened faces.

This Australian man was the first white man I saw at this hidden hotel and one of the first white people in this whole part of town. We met him a week ago before we went to Beijing. He always wears a baseball cap and boots and pants up to his ribs. His accent is so thick and his mouth opens so little and and he talks so fast--I thought he was just a burly Chinese man. He always misses the part of his beard above his lip when he shaves. We've caught him wandering listlessly down the street--on vacation in China, not sure if he likes it, not sure where he's going.

Sam

30 July, Color-Man, Shanghai

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' Communist Manifesto is a brilliantly dangerous book. In it, the writers have a passage that explains what Sam and I have seen all over the world, and especially here in China:

"The bourgeoisie," it says, referring to nations of rich, upper middle-class capitalists, "compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adapt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst...In one word, it creates a world after its own image. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian countries...dependent on civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West."

Their analysis is dead on. Like most dangerous ideas, the foundations they laid for communism were rooted in truth, but were twisted somewhere along the way. But this description is exactly the state of the world, even today.

I'm not sure what's left of "the East." Ghandi once looked to the East to save the world because he considered the West incapable. But democracy, free thought, and free trade (the enemy of communism) are spreading now more than ever, it seems. Nepal, the last Hindu nation, has just become secular. That leaves just hidden Bhutan, the final Buddhist kingdom. Sure, those religions still control millions of people, but politically, the masses have begun to see how those systems just don't work.

It seems that, for now at least, McDonalds and iPods and Hollywood will remain the kings of the world. There may be a better way, but the East has certainly not yet found it. And so the West will continue to create "a world after its own image," or, as is often the case with China, a world surpassing its own image.

Drew

30 July, Action-Man, Shanghai

Let me draw for you a picture of the Shanghai streets. On both sides of the Yangtze River, collosal scrapers loom over busy streets. To the west of the river is the old business center, Puxi, with the downtown core and the famous Bund, a rich avenue of colonial waterfront buidlings. Pleasant parks and clean streets fill the city. But the main thing is the towers. Everywhere and all the time, since 1989, new metal mammoths have risen out of the ground, soon to be filled with lights and noise and thousands of beating hearts. To the east of the river is the newly-developed Pudong district.

The Chinese seem to never cease in this rapid growth, and it seems they will never fail to suceed. The government is clever. When they began to build the new city centre in Pudong, across the river, they offered to pay half the citizens' rent to live ther. Soon, the buildings and streets filled. Pudong snowballed; more and more people wanted to move to the new, hip city. Now, the government has withdrawn its money, but the people still come. The inner city has effectively doubled in size.

You see, the Chinese are more adept to adapt than most of the rest of the world. In some ways, they are even more capitalist than America itself. China has shot up, dare I say, like a weed in the last ten years. But does this weed have roots? With 1.3 billion people, it's hard to say no. But only time will tell.

Drew

29 July, Action-Man, Beijing

Tonight, we took the Beijing subway to the famous silk market. It must have changed a bit since Marco Polo's day. As we ascended from the station, smiling young Chinese girls stood behind trays of Portuguese egg tarts (If you haven't had one you haven't yet lived) and crates of Chinese candies. A makeshift shop displays hundreds of pirated DVDs and CDs. But this, in the locals' eyes, is a respectable shop. They even let you test the disks to see if they work. True class.

In the silk market itself, those smiling girls turn into different animals. Outside rows and rows of shops, each selling fake Gucci bags and North Face jackets, they wait to suck in customers whose eyes linger too long over their merchandise. They whip out calculators cooly and begin their trade. "OK," said one, "retail price this shirt go for 680 yuan [80 bucks, yeah right]." She punched in the first number then said, "but I see you are student, ok, so I give you wery good price, give it you for 400, ok?" Sam and I asked for about a tenth of that, which infuriated her. She refused flat out. Soon enough though, with many punchings of buttons, she yielded. The price dropped to 20% of the original. We left with booty in hand, followed by cries of outrage.

After the silk market, we feasted. Chinese hotpot is not to be missed while in the Orient. Sharp waitresses bring out boiling bowls of soup and drop them down into a hole in the table. A fire is lit beneath. Then, eaters choose from a panoply of raw foods that make up the core of the meal. Sam and I ordered, among other things, duck paw, which arrived looking more like raw squid with bones. We dipped our morsels deep into the steaming soup, and soon even the most frozen bits were fired and ready to eat.

In our eating frenzy, Sam and I pushed our time in Beijing right up to the edge. Our sleeper train to Shanghai left at 7:21, and we left the restaurant at 7:00, bellies full. We taxied with all speed across town to the station and arrived with five minutes to departure. We sprinted like warriors across the busy steet, through crowds of glaring Orientals, past the ticket gate, up an escalator, through a long hallway and down to our platform. We jumped aboard with seconds to spare. As Jules Verne says in Around the World in Eighty Days, "Trains, like time and tide, stop for no one."

Drew

28 July, Action-Man, Beijing

This morning, at 8:30, an hour late, a brisk Chinese man came to our hotel and led us to his tour bus, bound for the Great Wall of China. The bus was full of Westerners. It was tight, like most Asian buses, but weird to rub shoulders not with a rajah or Brahmin priestesses, but with Europeans and Americans.

Progress was slow as we got on the road, and when a ten minute gas station stop turned into something longer, the Americans started to complain. Ahead of me was a group of silent Italians, and beside me were two Frenchmen. One had a dark tan and the other was fair with a big jaw and mouth and a broad forehead. Behind me were two shamefully talkative Americans.

The shelves of the gas station were sparse and the floor of the men's bathroom was very sticky. The problem, I think, is that they don't clean the bathrooms. They smell like frog dissection. They should keep the pipes to the urinals attached and use clean water when they mop. Western toilets undoubtedly excel the squatting toilets of the East. Outside the gas station, heavy orange trucks with green tarps tied over their cargo lined up on the shoulders of the highways. Apparently, the police are starting to crack down on weight restrictions and the truckers were waiting for the officers to leave the area.

Many hours later, we arrived at the Wall. It is higher up in the hills than I expected and I didn't expect so many steep stairs. The walls were packed with British and French tourists. But suddenly, looking to my left out in to the sharp hills, I spied the Mongol army approaching. Piles of wolf dung in the towers of the wall were lit and a chain of fire appeared on the horizon. All the watchmen were alerted. Just then arrows started to fly towards the sentries who took cover behind the ledge. A Mongol warrior pulled his arrow from a full quiver on his back. He set the arrow on his ox horn bow and took aim, as when hunting a bear or a tiger in the forest. He dug deeper in his stirrups and pulled the tasseled bridle of the snorting warhorse. In the distance, I heard the blow of a conch or a deer horn. The battle was on.

We left two hours late from the Wall and stopped at the same gas station as before. At first, the bus started to smell gamey like the Cono bus after a varsity soccer game. Sure enough, the big jawed Frenchman behind me had taken off his shoes. Then, after the gas station, the smell of store-bought cookies filled the air. Drew got back on the bus and said, "What's worse than a gas station bathroom?" He went on, "A Chinese gas station bathroom." I read until the sun went down, then turned across the aisle and talked to a young Brit named Joe Barnsley. He was my age and was a good conversationalist. He was the only guy that I was really in the mood for. We hit every important topic.

Sam

27 July, Color-Man, Beijing

I just finished listening to some Bach on Drew's iPOD, and I realized how little I have thought of God today. He wants me to think about him. And he wants me to not get tired of praying, as I count on the promise that he bestows "his riches on all who call on him." These are the riches of God, all the riches of Beijing and Shanghai, to us who call on him.

My last three or four days have been so rushed that I've hardly opened my Bible to read. Now that I have time, I hesitate to read it and again I want to put it off. I have become a partial stranger to it. I am even afraid that I won't understand it and that it won't do me any good.

Drew and I memorize one Proverb every day, and so tonight, I remember, "In the fear of the Lord, one has strong confidence and his children find a refuge." I am worried and tonight I need a refuge. And another Proverb says, "Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him." That's the only thing I want tonight--to side with Him and for Him to be involved with my life.

Sam

26 July, Action-Man, Shanghai

Tonight, Drew and I skyscrapered Shanghai. We even went to the top of the world's fourth tallest building. Shanghai is a forest of tall office buildings and hotels. Clouds roll and clot the glassy tops of the tallest skyscrapers, like young Himalayan mountains.

At the Jinmao tower, the world's fourth tallest building, across the river, we joined a crowd on the observation deck on floor 88. As you wait for the elevator, they have a display of the top twelve tallest buildings in the world. Taipei has the tallest tower, and most of them are in Asia. Three or four are in America. I wished that the World Trade Center was still up, so it could contend with Kuala Lampur and glittering Shanghai. Suddenly, I was sobered about America's power.

Will we remain the most powerful country in the world? Surely our skyscrapers testify to our long-standing supremacy. In 1931, we built the Empire State Building, and it remains in 2006 in the top twelve. Has God raised up China as an adversary to test America? How did colossal China get all of its economic wheels turning so quickly and so efficiently?

Sam

23 July, Action-Man, Kathmandu, Nepal

I was pretty disappointed when we found that we couldn't go to Tibet and Lhasa, its capital. It was just too expensive and we didn't have enough time. Paul, Silas and Timothy tried to go to Bythnia and Asia, but the Holy Spirit forbid them and hindered their way. God wanted them to go on to Macedonia. I rest in those words of the Bible. The Lord closed the door to Tibet.

Still, it would have been fun. A Frenchman and his wife here in the airport told us about a new train that goes from Shanghai to Lhasa in 48 hours. The beautiful Yunnan province and other beauties of China's east coast, they said, pale in comparison to the scenery between Lhasa and Kathmandu. We would have seen all that, but we didn't know any better in Kathmandu.

Here we sit in Kathmandu's airport in the middle of the night waiting to board our plane to Shanghai. But the tardy airline is treating its patient passengers with a midnight snack. They just rolled out carts of boxed food and metal drink dispensers with milk tea. The passengers fell on the refreshments like pesky birds of prey. I just went to refill my glass and found a large puddle beneath the spigot and broken bits of bread scattered on the table. Oh well, like many African airlines, no one knows the day or the hour of Royal Nepal Airlines.

Sam