Reflections on my China trip

Well, my China pictures are posted - actually I have oodles more but I posted my favorite ones - and it is now 2008 and I've decided to move on and use this blog to occasionally reflect on my travels and thoughts. I just bought a new World Atlas and I could spend hours and hours looking at it - there are so many wonderful places to visit! God certainly created an amazing world - so many different people and cultures. I'm so thankful for the gift of travel and all that I have been able to learn from it.

My most recent thoughts continue to focus on my time in China. I have so many different thoughts. Mostly, I feel sad for the Chinese because their country is trying to move ahead so fast and furious and many ordinary, rural Chinese people are getting left behind in a sense. When I was there I got to read the daily paper (in English) and some of the problems seem overwhelming - so much development so fast and the typical gap between the rich and the poor is so prevalent - and of course we have that in our country, but in China, the numbers of people are staggering. I can't even begin to express all of my thoughts and concerns..

Then there is the west of China - which frankly, is central Asia, culturally - not China (as can be clearly seen in my photos). There are so many issues there. I loved the culture and the Uyghur people I met. The music was amazing. There is a lot of life there in spite of all kinds of challenges. Once I got home, I spent days researching that part of China, I learned so much - things that could not be talked about when I was there or found on the web because the Chinese government blocks so much information. The history of that western province is fraught with conflicts and in the end, China seized that land. From my admittedly limited experience there, I observed no "Chinese culture" in the west (after being in the thick of "Chinese culture" for 3.5 weeks prior to my time out west), while the Uyghur culture was seemingly so vibrant and rich. It seems that Xinjiang is another place in the world where injustice is apparent....

But there is vibrancy in the Chinese church...I read some amazing books once I got home that I highly recommend: Safely Home by Randy Alcorn; The Heavenly Man by Brother Yun with Paul Hattaway; Back to Jerusalem also by Paul Hattaway. I also read David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing which was quite informative. Moving away from the Chinese church, Jan Wong's Red China Blues is a page-turner: I could not put it down.

As I think back to all these books - which I read with a kind of fanaticism upon my return from China last summer - I realize how much I keep learning.. Travel does this for me - it opens my eyes to so many different ways of thinking and responding to the world. So I come back again to my gratefulness for the opportunities I have had to learn and grow as a result of my travels. Thanks be to God!