/1st Yunnan trip
Prayerfully try to practice and experience unity, and to redefine poverty were my initial goals for my first Yunnan trip.
Through serval team meetings we had on the trip, I deeply realised how much encouragements we need on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter if you are a kid living in the mountains or a CEO working in a top investment bank or a white-headed pastor. It doesn’t matter how successful we may look on the outside. On the inside, we need similar things as human beings. I noticed it when the kids expressed genuine and uncontrolled joy for a sincere smile or even just one encouraging word that I repeated 20 times to 20 kids in one class. I noticed it through the sharing of how much unconditional love we received from the kids and how extraordinarily happy we felt because of it. As well as through the poverty we suffer constantly that I observed (e.g.how little we feel valued and concerned sometimes, how hurt we feel when we are wronged and how hopeless we are when we don’t know a better solution for things, etc).
If zooming in to examine, that’s great poverty, relational, emotional, as well as choice poverty. For we need love, self-esteem, dignity, trust, etc as much as we need food and water.
Poverty isn’t about lacking material things nor caused by unaware of what’s important in life. Poverty is the great exhaustion that caused by failing to put all the valuable resources in the right place. For example, I may use all my energy and strength to demand love from others but failing to give any. Or I may channel all the knowledge that I have to be suspicious and judgmental, but failing to care for vulnerabilities and slow to forgive.
Conversely, when I invest my time, money, love and attention in things that last, in people who’s the “least of these” (Matthew 25:45). I become stronger and richer than I can ever imagine. Being rich is that I dare to give the last bit of food I have to others, I dare to respond with love and forgiveness when I’m wronged and deeply wounded. Because I’m not the source of richness, God is.
I looked within, am I too shy to give compliments? Is it that I need to build my confidence on other people’s disgrace? Is it because it makes me less cool or even silly if I do so? Or am I too insecure that I have to protect myself from rejections? Am I worried that I would be emptied if I give out? Or because that I lack the necessary awareness that other people need encouragements as much as I do? Maybe none of them, or maybe all of them.
Therefore, I did a little practice after we came back. I chose the best pic or my favourite moment of every person on the team to send out a daily thank-you note as an encouragement. To thank someone may be easy, but to keep doing so, everyday, isn’t as easy as I thought. But in encouragements, I experienced the amount of richness, joy, unity and peace that I have not experienced before.
This is not the end, neither to the trip, to the practice nor to this sharing. But just a start. Because I encourage everyone who sees this to do the same. Now, I can confidently say that goals are achieved.
[ Final Greetings ]
Finally, brothers and sisters, rejoice! Strive for full restoration, encourage one another, be of one mind, live in peace. And the God of love and peace will be with you. (2 Corinthians 13:11)
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