Acts 2:46-47

You know those days that will go down in your diary as like one of the best days ever? Well that day is today my friends.

Let me start by introducing you to a new friend we had the privilege of meeting last week. Her name is Jing Chan, or "Valerie" from China. I met her because we each had to go with our professor to interview the owner of this fashion company for one of our assignments. We took the bus home together and started with the whole small talk thing. We talked about school, I told her about my job in Toronto, Selena's job, Jason, my family, basically everything. She was so curious and just kept asking questions and we all know how I love to talk. It was a match made in heaven. Well after a few minutes she asked if I had a religion. I told her I did, and explained a bit about Christianity. She knew nothing about it, it's crazy how we take for granted that we live in a Christian nation where everyone has heard about Jesus. She said in China no one really follows a religion. She seemed interested in the whole idea of Christianity, so I invited her to church with Sel and I that Sunday. She was in.

Sunday rolled around and we all met at the bus stop and went to church together. She was so excited to meet Selena, and had a million questions for her as well. Upon seeing her, she said, "Wow, you are so pretty too!". If nothing else Val was a good confidence boost for us ;), ha ha kidding. It was so interesting seeing things from her perspective based on the questions she was asking us. Basically everything she knew about Western culture was from what she saw in the movies, and she pegged us as the popular party girls who dated the football captain, so she was shocked to find out we haven't been to the club here once. Seriously, the mixing of cultures over here is incredible, we are learning so much about different countries.
She loved church and afterward had even more questions for us. We tried to answer all of them as best as we could on the bus ride home, and then planned to go to church together again the next Sunday.
The next Sunday we decided to try Hillsong church out here, and we all biked there. It was a 45 minute bike ride and the weather was great. During the ride Valerie started asking us how she could become a Christian and what kind of "rules" she would have to follow. We explained to her that there weren't really rules, just guidelines to live a better life. I briefly told her about the 10 commandments, and when I mentioned that we only believe in one god and that we should have no other gods before him, she asked if that meant she can't believe in Buddha. I tried my best to explain the conflict in that, and asked her if that would be a problem for her. She said, "no, not at all". I also asked what her family would think if she became a Christian, because I have heard of some Asian cultures disowning their children for believing in God, which we obviously wouldn't want. She said her family would be happy that she believes in something, and that they wouldn't care that it was Christianity. God was seriously doing something in her life, we were so excited for her! She was also wearing this necklace that she said her parents prayed over and said that it had Buddha's luck; right away she asked if we would touch it to take that away. It was neat, even though it was just a necklace, seeing her so readily do what she felt she needed to be a Christian.
Church was also amazing, this woman Christine Caine spoke from Hillsong London about the A21 Campaign she started. If you have time you should check it out, it's amazing what she is doing to help stop human trafficking: http://www.thea21campaign.org/.
After church we biked home and then made plans to have Valerie and her friend Alex over to our place for dinner. They wanted to make us traditional Chinese food, so they brought all of these crazy ingredients over and we made fried rice, pad thai, and attempted to make sticky rice (which unfortunately failed). We covered dessert, which consisted of Greek yogurt and fresh fruit. It was all delicious!
After dinner she had more questions for us about our faith and what we believe. We showed her our bibles, and gave her the coles notes version (Adam and Eve, Jesus, etc). She asked what she had to do to become a Christian, and we just told her it was a simple prayer. We did it with her right then and there, and she was SO happy afterward (heck, so were we). Her willingness just blew us away. At home so often you can tell people about Christianity but they are turned off of it because of hypocritical or crazy Christians they have met, or they think it's all about rules, or they just couldn't be bothered to believe in anything. Valerie, having no preconceived notions or biases, was able to see God through this unclouded lens, and loved what she saw. It was really refreshing to see.
She is going to keep coming to church with us every week, we showed her some good places to start reading in the bible, and we are going to try and get her connected with some people from our church here so that when we leave in December, she'll still have some church friends. It was all very exciting, and we are so glad to have met her! She is so honest, inquisitive and real, we absolutely love hanging out with her. 

In this last picture, Valerie is on the left and her friend Alex is on the right. We have dinner plans with them this Thursday and they are going to cover dinner again and we are going to do dessert (our specialty)!
School has also been picking up, we finally had to do some presentations this week at school. Thanks to the very low bar that has been set by the Dutch students, we are acing everything. We are actually also learning a lot because they give you a huge amount of autonomy over your work. It's great!

Thanks for following along with us on our trip! As of tomorrow it is only 2 more months until we are back in Winnipeg!