REFLECTION: Sent

Written by Scott Dowman, Academic Dean of Trinity College Queensland.

Shortly after coming to faith in my early twenties, I faced a challenging crossroads. I’d been living and working on the Gold Coast, and I’d been saving a deposit for a unit at Burleigh Heads. A perfect unit, with full ocean views, came on the market.  But at the same time, I felt called by God to do a short-term mission to China.

The dilemma - home unit or mission trip?

I chose the mission trip and ended up being sent by my church to spend 12 weeks in China.  It was a life-changing experience that involved smuggling Bibles to persecuted believers and spending time in China’s underground church movement listening to, and learning from, the testimonies of followers of Christ who had suffered for the sake of their faith.  Most of these churches had only one Bible and church members would sacrificially make time, at all hours of the day, for a chance to read the Bible.  Devotion in the most extreme of circumstances.

After visiting one of these churches, I boarded a train in a remote part of western China. A young man named Jiang* was sharing the same sleeper compartment. He was an engineer, spoke excellent English and started sharing his story. He’d attended university in Beijing and was part of the Tiananmen Square protests in the late 80s. He reflected on the horror of Tiananmen, the death of his friends and how the government had sent him to a remote part of China after the protests. He said the event had caused him to reflect on the purpose of life.

I didn’t know what to say. But I told him I’d also been searching for the meaning of life in the months before my journey to China and I’d found answers in the Bible and the teachings of Jesus.  He’d heard about Jesus but was sceptical about whether Jesus could provide the answers he was seeking.  At the end of our eight-hour journey I handed him a copy of the gospel of John, in the Chinese language, and challenged him to read it.  We shared contact details, and I encouraged him to write to me to tell me what he thought.

Several months past, before I eventually received a letter in the mail.  In the letter Jiang described as he read the gospel ‘something happened’. The book changed him, and he believed what John was saying - Jesus IS Lord. He was now attending an underground church.

God’s ways are not our ways.

I still look longingly at the unit at Burleigh when I visit the Coast. If I’m to be honest, a small part of me would love to live there. But God challenges us to not store treasures on Earth, but treasures in heaven. God sent me from one part of the world to a remote part of China to share a message of hope that had an eternal impact on a young man searching for answers.

What’s God calling you to do?  Where’s he sending you? For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21).

*Not real name