Lent 2004

Dear Friends,

Last night I went with the students in my Preaching 2 class to an area of Taipei that is most popular with teenagers. I asked my students to spend an hour-and-a-half walking through this crowded shopping district using Christ’s eyes to observe. The area has huge billboards with David Beckham, the English soccer star, selling mobile phones and Japanese music stars selling makeup. Taiwanese teenagers come to this area to see and be seen. They wear the latest fashions and have the latest hairstyles.

I asked my students to ponder a number of questions as they walked around and observed. What human hunger do they see? What sadness do they see? What happiness do they see? Where is Christ in this neighborhood? Where is the Kingdom of God?

The shopping area was packed with teenagers. There is an expression in Mandarin Chinese which translates “crowded with a celebrative feeling.” It was crowded and celebrative as we walked around. But one block away from the bright lights of the stores selling the newest fashions I wandered into a temple for the folk goddess, Matsu. The Taiwanese call her the Holy Heavenly Mother or the Savior of the Downtrodden. Inside the temple I saw several young adults moving from shrine to shrine offering their prayers to different wooden statues of gods. I saw desperation on some faces. I saw a deep longing. Taiwanese usually go to the temple when they have a deep need, physical, emotional, or spiritual. And I saw need on the faces of those in the temple.

But we also saw need on the faces of the teenagers. Many of their clothes were new and there was not a hair out of place, but within their hearts the same fears and hopes.

I pray that our seminary students will become effective messengers of the good news of Jesus Christ as they prepare to serve as pastors. I hope the good news will change them as they seek to be agents of change in this land.

We left the shopping area and took the subway to a large university hospital. On the eighth floor we went to visit a young aboriginal pastor who graduated last year. When he was 15, he caught strep throat. Because there was no doctor in his mountain village and he had no access to antibiotics, he then caught scarlet fever, which affected his heart. He will have heart surgery this week to replace two of the valves which were damaged by the scarlet fever. The students sang several hymns to him, I read from Psalm 121,and then we all prayed for him and for his family.

I could see the longing in his eyes. But I also saw the truth of the good news in his eyes. He said that when the anesthesia began to make him fall asleep, he would rest in God’s hand.

Blessings on your Lenten journey.

John McCall

The 2004 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 96