Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Riding in an Airplane

Our trip to China gave us many hours of opportunities in airplanes to have conversations with strangers. What is amazing to me is how difficult it was to achieve! Ipods, Ipads and earbuds help people keep the "riff-raff" out of their personal space.


Add on eye masks and the wall becomes more effective still. Even on a 15 & 1/2 hour flight! My gentle questions yielded only wordless noise and one word answers. It was refreshingly different on our departure flight from Hong Kong. I(Carol) sat next to a lovely young woman who was open to conversation.









She personified for me what I had been reading about in "The Meeting of the Waters: 7 Global Currents" by Fritz Kling. She was HongKong Chinese, attended college in Australia where she met her Korean boyfriend. She was flying to Cian to visit him. He was there studying mandarin to enhance his International Business degree. (multi cultural experiences) We had wonderful conversation about world values versus Christian values (not American values) and how they affect personal life, family, business and government. It blessed me that after collecting luggage at the baggage claim she thought enough of how we connected to come and say good bye again and show me to her boyfriend. I am glad Father knows them by name because I intend to keep them in prayer and hope to meet them again when I get home.













Monday, August 8, 2011

Keeping In Touch

In this day, keeping in touch with people should not be difficult. We have emailing, snail mailing, texting, tweeting, phoning, skyping, and on and on it goes. One of the lessons from our trip was keeping in touch matters ... ALOT!

One way we have accomplished this in our ISI Northeast region is our monthly prayer call. Each month, at the appointed time we, as many as can, dial in to a conference call and Richard co-ordinates and leads us.






We praise God for who He is, share answers to prayer and thank Father, share requests and pray for one another. It has help us grow in comraderie and affection. We are no longer strangers when we meet at conferences or when we travel. Although awkward when we first started 10 years ago we have pressed through.


There are many good lessons for me as we seek to keep in touch with our student friends around the globe --- just do it; press through the awkwardness; praise God; share answers to prayer; share what God is doing as well as our requests; do it routinely. Excuse me, a - skyping - i - must - go !