Its been a long process learning Chinese but a good one. Aside from learning the language we really learned a lot about ourselves and our insecurities when it comes to speaking a foreign language.We've been humbled many times speaking and using the wrong tones, messing up the language and just trying to have grace for ourselves and accepting grace from the locals. But it is a great feeling to begin to understand the Taiwanese in their heart language and we are excited about using Chinese to bring the kingdom of God in Taiwan.
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| pics from our celebration of finishing Chinese |
Our next step: We are planning to move out closer to the beach by the end of March. This is a huge step for us because we are going to be leaving the comforts of our missionary community and friends and pioneering a new ministry. A excited but scary step in faith for us. The town called Jinshan is a little more rural with around 25,000 people. And another hard part is most of the locals actually don't speak the Mandarin Chinese we learned but speak Taiwanese which is a totally different language. This is common in rural areas.
But thankfully all the surfers speak Mandarin and most locals when we speak back to them in Mandarin will speak to us in Mandarin. So I ( Chris) after moving out, along with doing ministry will also work on learning Taiwanese. Not taking classes but using a method called LAMP to learn Taiwanese.
We really believe this is what God has been preparing us for. Our heart has always been to go to places where there isn't a strong Christian presence and be the light in the community. We are really believing that when we move out and have more consistency meeting with people we have shared the gospel with, people are going to come to Christ and churches are going to be formed and multiplied in Taiwan surf community and its gonna be lead by the Taiwanese. Please keep us in your prayers.
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