Ready, get set, FLEX

The final week before departure for any team going to a new culture can be fraught with interesting challenges. All the planning is done, all the reading, all the preparation. But in the end, the venture belongs to God, and not to us.

This perspective helps when we get emails from the other side of the globe telling us that housing is changed, that the usual venues may not be available, that numbers of various program participants are changing daily. The question on this side always comes down to, “How much to we push back?” What is culturally appropriate?

The TESOL program is now in the 10^th year with the same university, so we have history. The TESOL program brings, at minimal cost to the university, high level teachers who are volunteering their time to invest in the lives of students and professors. Over the decade, the relationship has grown into a deep friendship, especially with Ping, our primary contact. 

Trust comes hard in China. There’s a lot of history that works against trust.  The administrators with whom we work were born during the Great Leap Forward, grew up in the Cultural Revolution, cut their eye teeth at Tienanmen, and now work as mature adults in a swiftly tilting world that they sometimes don’t even recognize.  No wonder change is normal, nothing is stable, and making commitments stick is difficult. 

The TESOL program has proved to be trustworthy, to flex, to not flinch and complain when life does not go as we planned.  That gives us the platform to push back and make some quiet demands of what we must have if the program is to function. We have value so we can ask. We push back and some concessions are made.

Ping’s final email this morning says, “Looking forward to being with you. We’ll work out details when you get here. Cheers!”

Indeed, we will work out the details. We trust Ping and he trusts us. We know the demons that surround him in his work place and how he is pressured on all sides. We know his favorite reading is the lives of revolutionaries, that he missed the roundup in 1989 by a mere phone call that took him away from standing in solidarity with his students. He in turn knows what we believe and why we come. In fact, he may also be a follower of Jesus, but we know he can’t wear that label right now. Together we’ll make a summer program happen. 

We leave in God’s hands, on His wings, knowing that whatever happens on the other side of the world, He has been there all the time, working the details.