How God connects us to students is amazing!  Lucia came to our zoom conversation class but was in Italy!  Formerly she had been a student at VT.  Sadly her boyfriend died from covid.  She has been devastated as they were soon planning to be married.  We are now meeting weekly and are doing a book on grief from the Christian perspective.  I (Mary Kay) am learning lots about Italy and also the Lord is teaching me how to comfort and listen…

And listen some more. Sadly a young Chinese couple we know just lost their premature baby of 25 weeks, after 3 weeks of struggling after birth.  He looked like he was going to make it but then almost by surprise he stopped breathing.  Pray for moments of opportunity to love and to share His hope with this grieving, preChristian couple. Recently in our conversation class we discussed the topic of death and every single person in the class expressed that in their culture people are very afraid of dying. 

What a joy to share our hope with all of them of the life to come!

I was stunned by the question that my Chinese, non-Christian friend asked. We had been studying the Bible for months. Surely he knew me better than that; I wouldn’t kill any baby, especially not a baby Jesus!

Still reeling in dizziness from the question, I hesitated to answer. Why did he ask? We had just read about King Herod who had sent soldiers to kill all of the babies in Bethlehem. It wasn’t until later that I understood why he asked.

His father-in-law had worked for the Communist Party. His job was to find and escort pregnant women, who already had a baby, to the hospital or clinic in order to get an abortion of the second child, even against their wishes. Often he would know the young women or their families, so he would call them the night before to warn them that he was coming.

All very frightening, and similar to Herod’s soldiers.

His question was really this: if the government required you to assist in aborting babies, would I do it?

I didn’t get to that question, but I did reflect on his original question. I had paused; of course I would like to say “no,” that since God is first in my life I would never kill a baby as Herod tried. But as I thought about my wayward heart, I realized that if God was not first, then I would probably kill too. So I replied:

That’s the question we all have, and we all must answer it. For Herod to let Jesus live would mean for him to no longer be the king. For us to let Jesus live in our heart, we can no longer live as the king of our lives, we must bow to Jesus in every area of lives. That is not easy to do, no one wants to give up their authority, especially a king, and especially over their own life.

That’s the question for each of us, will we let the baby Jesus be the Lord of our life, or would we kill the baby so we can be Lord?

We are so glad that we have given up our lives. And that together with you, we can serve this Lord.

Merry Christmas, may we each hold this dear Jesus close to our hearts, until his Kingdom has come.

How do you get non-Christians interested in reading the Bible? How do you read the Bible with them!

Though unexpected, we jumped at the opportunity to share with this young international Christian couple. They were leaving Virginia Tech for a job, and they too had a vision for reaching internationals. We have mutual friends from Asia that we have been trying to reach. So we shared a few pointers, and stories, and then we gave them our books showing them how! Then they spent the next two days driving with time to read the books!

Our vision is to recruit and help others in the work of reaching the world at our door step. We have now set up a Zooming video conferencing group with a local church. We do culture chats once a month, with the hope of meeting in person some day soon. The internationals are willing but it has been hard to motivate the Christians! So help us pray to move the mountains!

PS Our books are online at Amazon here: A Walking Stick Guide to Genesis, Matthew and our bi-biography (Before We Forget). You can download them for only a dollar! Also our website has many stories of how people respond when we share.

We just went to Monticello, the former home of Thomas Jefferson, with a group of internationals. But that is not what the students were most impressed with.

Our Japanese friend shared:

 One of the greatest things I had during this visit to the US was meeting God and his Son again.

She had grown up Catholic in Japan but it has not been very real to her.  Now she has been attending several Bible studies and her faith is becoming real.

When we go on trips we have great opportunities to speak more deeply.

When we traveled to Monticello over Spring Break, I (Mary Kay) ended up sitting in the far back seat with a student as another student had a tendency to get car sick and so she sat up with Fred who was driving.  (God can even use car sickness!) What a blessing as the student from Korea and I got to chat more privately.  She has been attending many Bible studies and she shared this comment:

I met lots of good people who have a faith and trust in God here.  I will keep reading the Bible and I am trying to understand God’s Word better.  I learned here what having a sincere belief is and having a faith mean.

She continued: “How do I find real Christians when I go back home to Korea?” as she said many people in Korea just go to church but it doesn’t impact their lives and they don’t read the Bible.

Please pray for her to find that community of strong believers.

I (Mary Kay) was to meet with Tsen but she was late in arriving as she and her husband had had a bad argument.  It was a time to listen but then I was able to share the theme of forgiveness with her.  Also we discussed various techniques of communication.  Several days later I followed up with a text and this is what she responded with…

We are getting pretty well. And we tried the speaker listener method. It worked! Thanks for your suggestion and help!

MK: I am so glad to hear that you did the speaker listener technique!

Yes. We tried. And we are more gentle today.

This is real love. Being more gentle with each other, even when we don’t feel like it. As part of our work with young couples, we introduce Christian truths in marriage counseling. We now are leading a Sunday marriage group, mostly non-Christians.

Some of our work is from the PREP program which we highly recommend, as it teaches communication techniques that changes behavior, while allowing us to introduce Christian principles to change thinking. Here is the Floor – Speaker Listener technique that we are teaching them.

You can look up “PREP Christian” or write to us for more information.

MAY we all be more GENTLE this Valentine Season!

We were reading a story about my brother-in-law who struggles with Parkinsons. At the end of the story, he shares that he is thankful most for salvation. I was reading with a non-Christian (Wei), during our weekly reading, who had expressed no religious interest for the last 4 months. He asked:

What is Salvation?

We pray for the opportunities, and we jump when the fish bites! I started a dialog about heaven and hell. Stopping me, he explained: “Oh yes, I have heard about heaven. Good people go to heaven and people who do bad things go to hell.”

Trying not to let him off the hook, I asked what it means to do good, or to be bad, and whose standards are we using? I got him to see that we all do bad things when we compare ourselves to Jesus’ standard in the Bible.

So who goes to heaven?

I looked for an analogy. “My son Joey goes to school here to. And he is having a party, but you cannot come, why not?” “Because I do not know him.” “That’s right. It doesn’t matter how rich or how smart his friends are, but it is important that you be his friend and know him. That’s how it is in heaven.

We all have done wrong, but the question is, do we know Jesus, do we know God?

We started reading Matthew, and Wei was surprised to read that Jesus was a real person, and that he was born 2019 years ago! But now Wei has a Bible app and he knows where to start reading.

Please pray that Wei will continue to pursue this new discovery, soon, as he returns to China next month!

… who lives with you, as yourself – Leviticus 19 :33-34.

The only thing better than going to the Museum of the Bible was bringing non-Christians there! Here we were walking in a recreated Nazareth village and we saw a description of hospitality.

Love the foreigner…

One student shared how he had been in America for two years, but he didn’t have any friends, except for now the Chinese Christians reaching out to him.

We had lots of great conversations and clarifications with our seeking friends. We saw how forgiveness was powerful for rescuing people in prison, I told them what I had seen when I worked there.

We sat at a table and saw the universality of Christians with different meal time thankfulness from across the world. We kind of experienced the Old Testament as we walked through the Red Sea.

My (Fred’s) most difficult conversation was trying to explain the American revivals in the 1700s and 1800s. I prayed as an atheist student openly shared his ‘faith’ in Psychology and his distrust of religion (he was from a Muslim culture, very understandable). But a non-Christian quickly defended religion!

I pointed out that Jesus was very opposed to the religionists in his day, and that instead of religion, I suggested we each need a direct connection to God to cope with the confusing issues of today.

In the end of the conversation, we left respecting each other, open to more dialog, and I think very curious about us Christians who don’t believe in religion, but who believe in Jesus.