Dear church,
It has been a whirlwind of a month getting prepared for this missions trip! One month ago, Nancy was just sitting pretty and hoping to one day do missions as she has always dreamed of. Steph was thinking she wasn’t going on missions as planned at all when she applied for another team but it didn’t need any more family docs and feeling a tad bummed. Then through a divinely blessed chain of events, another affiliated missions team emailed Steph to say they were in great need of more docs, and Steph shared this with Nancy and she said “That’s cool! Maybe I’ll go too! I have exactly enough vacation days to use by the end of the year and I don’t want to spend it Black Friday shopping with Ivan!” (just kidding Ivan). Within one week, both of us learned we were going and had two months to plan!
Nancy has gone on a Habitat for Humanity trip to Africa in the past, but she’s seeking a different role in this missions where she can personally share her faith to those who don’t know the love of Jesus yet. Steph has been on medical missions to Brazil and the Philippines before but this will be her first to China, a country where as a Chinese person, people would expect her to know the language and surely her wasted years faking her way through Chinese school will fail her. They might as well speak Spanish for all she knows.
One huge obstacle that we have been warned about is the lack of evangelistic freedom in China. With rigid communistic rules in place, no one is allowed to freely evangelize and preach the Word during working hours, and also to minors for fear of being kicked out of the country. We will be setting up free medical clinics in factories and churches outside of Guangzhou, and through our works and telling our story, we hope to show the people of China the spiritual freedom they can experience with a life filled with God.
We ask the Church to help us out by praying for openness and eagerness of the hearts of the Chinese to hearing about Jesus. We also ask for prayers for physical safety from natural disasters as there have been several typhoons in the surrounding area that may present obstacles for the team to travel to the factories and churches in more remote areas of Guangzhou. Pray for spiritual safety in an environment where people are not as blessed as in Canada to express their spirituality. Pray that there is cohesiveness in the team to operate as effectively as possible and build relationships between team members and the Chinese people. We also ask for the church to pray that we enter and exit China without too much difficulty as Stephanie and Nancy are already experiencing problems obtaining their visas.
We are incredibly excited to be serving together abroad as great friends and sisters in Christ!