Rant of the Exiles

Having spent most of my life in Silicon Valley, I'm always somewhat surprised when I leave here to find that most Chinese people don't work in the high-tech industry. It testifies to how much of a bubble I live in. In our Chinese church, 95% of the working people (including the Chinese-speaking congregation) are engineers. We have one remodeling contractor and no doctors, nurses, or lawyers. Last week I was in Bournemouth, a city on the south coast of England, to speak at a discipleship training camp. We had an amazing speaker-participant ratio - there were four teachers (including myself) and twenty students. Even though the conference was conducted in English, half of the participants were overseas Chinese. As far as I can tell, there is no Chinese church in Bournemouth so Chinese students attend local international churches/fellowships. There is a significant foreign student population in the city due to its abundance of language schools. The Chinese people I met in Bourn...

Child-like faith is imagination. And imagination is the door into the spiritual realm. In this sense, all faith is child-like. Faith is the willingness to see what is unseen. Child-like faith is the courage to ride your imagination as far as it will take you. It is the refusal to place any bounds on one's journey into the imagined. It is indulging whimsy. It is being utterly un-self-conscious. It is doing stupid things, making a fool of yourself, all while taking in the world with breathless wonder. When I watch my boys play battle with their LEGO creations or my daughter dress up her dolls, I don't need to remind them that it is all pretend. Because it is real. The truth is their fantasy world. They delight in their toys because they perceive an unseen reality beyond the plastic pieces they manipulate. When my kids have nightmares, it is not helpful to tell them their dreams aren't real. Because they are real. The fear is real. The monsters are real. We don...