Mongolia revisited...

It's interesting how God uses everyone and everything around you to aid in your spiritual walk, all it takes from you is the willingness to look.

Tonight I was "txt"ed to dinner @ my favourite Korean restaurant, during which I met someone named J. When J. was introduced to me as "he went to Mongolia the year before", all of a sudden, without thinking first, I burst out "Are you J. from Seattle?" and followed up with a burst of uncontrollable laughing ... boy O boy... :p Yes, the bay area Asian Christian community is *really* that small...

well, it turns out that J. is the former trip leader for the first GrX Mongolia short term missions trip. And I have already heard an earful of him during those long mid-night chats around the water boiler with other trip members. Natually, he got curious and asked what reputation preceded him. This got us into a discussion concerning the practices and leadership styles, most of all, what we all learned during the short term mission trip..

Coincidentally, ever since the sermon last Sunday, I have been thinking about the team that just left for Mongolia this summer, and memories from last summer came back. I recall all the things I learned during that trip, the lessons God taught us about work, volunteer, cherish financial resources, and most of all, LOVE. I continued to share my lesson learned on the "leader has monopoly on $$" theme with J., and I remembered how frustrating it was to me at first, the culture shock, then the reason behind doing so, and at the end of the trip, how we all came to the conclusion that it was indeed a great lesson learned.

In the past several days, the sermon from Pastor Steve really hit home with me. Also a lot of my friends are leaving for the various mission trips this summer, to witness all their effort and read about their prayer letters really helped me to re-center my perspectives. I will try to write more about my Mongolia trip experience later.. (trouble is, it's hard to share something like that without mentioning the actual people involved and things happened.. kinda conflicts with this "anonymous" thing.... Um... delimma... )

Mongolia --- the land of eternal blue sky, the last frontier of modern Western civilization, a group of people still living on the land and ride bareback on horses... It has been in my dreams now and then... My prayers go out to you all!