My Family in Beijing

Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to show my family around Beijing. It was so good to see all of them. During the week I took them to Tiananmen, The Forbidden City, Houhai, Beihai Park, The Temple of Heaven, 798 (The art district here in Beijing), a Chinese Church, The Great Wall, and a few different markets. Despite really enjoying showing them the city I've been living in for the last year, the thing I enjoyed most was introducing them to my friends, my teachers, and my home- stay family. It was so cool to interpret for my two different families, and see them interact. Through the course of my two different families spending time together a few things became evident. They both liked each other and really seemed to enjoy spending time together. My home- stay mother actually took my family to a market I didn't know about while I was in class one day. This made for some really interesting stories about how the communicated without speaking. We also figured out that rubbing my Dad's beautiful head crosses cultures as my home- stay mother rubbed my dad's head when she gave my family a happy Buddha statue as a gift. It was so good to see my family and spend a lot of quality time with them. I really can't wait to be back home and see them on a daily basis. If anyone would like to see pictures from the trip they are all on my facebook.

Outside of seeing my family recently, I've really just been studying and hanging out with my friends. I have also had the opportunity to join a baseball team. The team is comprised of all Koreans who are going to college here in China. They are all new to the game which makes games really interesting. Outside of me and another guy on our team all of them started playing a year ago. We play every Saturday as a part of league. We've qualified for playoffs and will be starting those in two weeks. If we keep winning we'll finish sometime in the middle of May. So, hopefully I'll be able to play ball with them for about another month.

The last "text" study I had, I decided to just have everyone ask about things they wanted to know about Christianity. I thought this would be better than me teaching about a specific topic or grouping of verses as I don't feel that teaching like that is one of my gifts and most of the people who come are really just exploring Christianity and are really curious. This worked out really well I really feel like I got to clear up some misconceptions. In conversation one of the people said that she had talked to her mother about perhaps becoming a Christian and her mother told her she didn't think she should because of the pressure that comes with it. This question made me really think about the emphasis some people tend to put on works within the Christian life. I think what people tend to forget is that works are supposed to flow out of us in worship. In other words our good works are supposed to be fruits of the spirit, therefore these good works should simply flow out of our love for God. When we put emphasis on works we often tend to take the grace and love out of the Christian walk, therefore taking away the biggest thing that separates Christianity from other religions, our savior's grace. If we put our emphasis on loving God, we take the "pressure" out of the Christian life and the rest will be taken care of in our process of loving God.

Hope everyone is doing well back in the states, and

GO BRAVES!!!