Hong Kong, Exhaustion Guaranteed

First off, here is a blog I wrote for the CTI 14:21 blog about a week into our trip to Hong Kong:
http://ctimusic.org/teams/fulltime-2012-2013/cti-1421/1369-at-a-moments-notice

It's a good insight to what I was thinking in the middle of the trip.



Anyways, back to now. Hong Kong was exhausting in many ways, in all the best ways. My arms and hands were tired from carrying things, my body was tired from always being on the go, my brain was tired from attempting to process everything, and my spirit was tired from being poured out. Let me explain that last one.

Something I've been told a few times at CTI is that we pour out of the overflow of our relationship with Christ. It's a deep idea that I'd love to unpack in detail, but it isn't really the purpose of this post so I'll keep it going. Basically, after doing these concerts, we must "refill" our relationship with God or we'll get burned out. In HK we played around 50 concerts in 19 days. Unlike our stateside ministry, our concerts involved more verbals. These verbals were before every song and given by every team member. We gave many "testiminis" between songs.

One of the ways we as a team would spiritually refill ourselves was with bible study at the beginning and end of the day. We would read a chapter each morning and would read it again at night. We read through 1 John and then through Philippians. This turned out to be a great way to book end our days.

One of the things I took from it all was a verse from Philippians 4:11. Paul describes how he's learned to be content in all situations, regardless of his circumstances. The way I understand it is more like, "you don't need to be having a good day to be content". Even if bad things happen to us, we can still chose to rejoice in the Lord always (Philippians 4:4). Considering our ministry involves a lot of people looking at us, I think this is a critical thing to understand. And in a place like HK were you can have many ups and downs in one day, this was a great lesson to learn.

One other thing I learned was how simple it was to discuss the gospel with people. Obviously it's simply, but I always build it up in my mind and I get uncomfortable about sharing sometimes. But after a few conversations with people during street ministry, I realized how easy it is. If I can talk about Jesus with people who barely know any English, of course I can do it with people in America. And so can you!

It's good to be back, and I hope I can be a changed person because of my experience in HK.