Fearless Knight

This pic which my friend Kevin took last Saturday of the knight in front of the Settle Inn reminds me a little of a youtube video for boys back in Taiwan.

Another Answered Prayer

Week before last in Lincoln, NE, I heard the following story from Tim and Cori, pastor and wife of a local Alliance church:

For the last year, Cori had been praying that God would bring another girl her daughter’s age into their neighborhood. Specifically, one from a great Christian family and to a house where they could see each other's front yards since Cori’s daughter is only nine. Cori often felt guilty asking it to be a Christian family rather than a family they could share the love of Christ with but since her daughter goes to public school and is around so many non-believers she was hoping God would bless her in this way. Cori prayed for specific houses whenever she saw one for sale and even started to give up on the "front yard" part of her prayer since God didn't seem to answer.

Some time later, the pastor of a sister church in the same town of the same denomination stopped his car right outside Tim and Cori’s house. Cori, assuming he must have been there to meet with her husband, asked what brought him over. He said that they had recently purchased the empty house just a stone's throw away! The front yard is clearly visible. Their two daughters are within a year of being the same age!

Cori adds that prior to this they didn't know each other very well but the wives would visit and the kids would play together one to two times a year when they would see each other at bi-annual conferences. The girls have become fast friends.

Hallam, Nebraska

The last 3 nights I’ve been staying with new friends Curtis and Joetta in Hallam, Nebraska.

Haven’t heard of Hallam? It’s a small farming town of about 200 southwest of Lincoln. It was also the site of one of the greatest tornados of all time:

http://www.tornadochaser.net/hallam.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2004_tornado_outbreak_sequence#Hallam_Tornado_Outbreak

In fact, Curtis and Joetta’s fairly new home was destroyed in 2004 by the tornado. The home I’m visiting now was rebuilt from scratch. Our Taiwan Field Forum speaker from 2004 is the pastor of the church not too far from here. He came over to share with us just a few months after the terrible tornado.

On another note, day before yesterday Curtis took me to visit his son Darren’s farm a couple of hundred of yards away. As I observed a few weeks ago over in Iowa, the integration of hi-tech in today’s farming equipment is truly something to behold. Perhaps even more than years past, to be a farmer requires one to be a “jack of all trades”, understanding not just how to plant, irrigate, harvest, repair the machinery, accounting, etc. but also much that is new in electronics.

First Piece of Pizza

Last week I stayed for 3 days with the family of this little boy, who at the moment I snapped this picture was enjoying his first piece of pizza ever in his young life. Why did he have to wait so long?

Teagan and his little sister Amara were born intolerant to absolutely anything having to do with corn (and almost anything has sucrose in it these days), suffering stomach aches and other unpleasant reactions whenever they ingested it. Doctors helplessly stood by doing nothing, going so far as to intimate that the allergies/intolerances were only imagined.

After years of preparing special corn-restricted diets, mom and dad were at the end of their ropes. At the suggestion of the mother’s mother, the parents went to see a faith healer by the name of Randy Clark. He prayed for the two children--- not in any sort of large-scale special meeting but quietly and behind the scenes.

In the last couple of weeks since their visit, the couple has been cautiously optimistic that their two children have been healed!

The mother showed me three books by Paul King her mother had sent her:  Genuine Gold: The Cautiously Charismatic Story of the Early Christian and Missionary Alliance, Nuggets of Genuine Gold: Experiencing the Spirit-Empowered Life, and Anointed Women: The Rich Heritage of Women in Ministry in the Christian & Missionary Alliance (I read the first title a few years ago and translated a few pages worth of quotes from it into Chinese).

This is the second instance of parents believing God healed one of their children in less than a week. Here’s the first one I heard from another mother last week in Charles City. So that’s the story behind the little boy’s picture above!

New Asian Friends in Lincoln, Nebraska

Last Monday I hopped a ride down to Lincoln, Nebraska, where I’m  visiting and speaking for the next couple of weeks. To my surprise, when I got out of the car in front of the home of my host family, I was greeted by a man with Taiwanese ancestry—the first I’ve met in Iowa or Nebraska.

Kevin is a cancer doctor at an area hospital. His wife Maybelle, a Filipino American, is a PA (physician’s assistant) in another location. Both Kevin and Maybelle are faithfully living out the call to “Be Light” in the marketplace.

Kevin invited me to “job shadow” with him yesterday, visiting  patients and hanging out in his office at the radiology clinic. As you can see, he’s a huge Jeremy Lin fan!

Read more about Kevin and his Taiwanese roots on page 23 of this article about Lincoln’s 20 Under 40.

Also, for anyone interested in leaning more about cancer, Kevin highly recommends the recent bestseller The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Besides church meetings and meals, other activities I enjoyed this week included taking Kevin and Maybelle’s friendly pit-bull Laoban 老闆 (Mandarin Chinese for “boss”) for an hour-long walk while his owners were working. LaoBan pulls very hard on the leash!

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Thursday night after basketball with a few men from the church and community, we enjoyed some Vietnamese-style sandwiches, bubble tea, and coffee!