Author: Ryan

This is one of China’s four most celebrated folklores. Like the other great love stories, it contains humor, separation, longing, heartbreak, death, and of course, unrelenting love. We cherish these stories with plays, films, and music because our souls are helplessly stirred by their yearning. They echo the great cosmic love story that we live in, which also contains humor, separation, longing, heartbreak, death, and unrelenting love. In all of these stories, our souls are not satisfied until the lovers are united. So too with the cosmic love story in which we live; our hearts are restless until we are united with the God who pursues us with his relentless love.

Christmas is not a national holiday in China (and in many other nations), and I do not imagine that my relatives in China will be getting together to sing carols and exchange presents. But I am willing to bet with my life that in China, in other parts of Asia, in the Middle East, in Africa, in South America, there are thousands of followers of Jesus who will be risking their livelihood to gather on this Christmas Sunday for no other reason than being together to celebrate our hope in the birth of Christ. I know Christians in recent years have often only held services on Christmas Eve, but this Christmas Sunday should be especially meaningful because we will not only be celebrating with our earthly families, but also with our brothers and sisters around the world. Even the closest earthly families are only foretastes of the communion of the saints we have in God’s eternal kingdom, and this Christmas Sunday we will have a chance to celebrate both.

We lived in one of the biggest cities in China, but when I first started elementary school, we would meet in one-story huts whose roofs would leak during rainy days. We had not yet heard of McDonald’s or Pizza Hut, none of our homes were air-conditioned, and the best toys I had were the ones passed onto us by our relatives in Hong Kong. The first major change in my life occurred when my school moved into a brand-new, six-story building in 1994. Unfortunately, this was not the only major move that year. In the great transition from public enterprises to private companies in the early 1990s, many state-owned companies began to decline. Since our little apartment was provided by my parents’ work, the decline of their state-owned company also meant the loss of our home. This was not particular only to my family. Others like my parents – in their early 40s and poorly educated due to the Cultural Revolution – suddenly found themselves without work and without a state safety net to support them.   

This became an important lesson for me not just in dating, but also in teaching the Bible. Some cultures may not have the categories through which we commonly communicate Biblical concepts.

These are the Chinese immigrants who, despite having been in this country for decades, often still feel like foreigners if they do not speak the language. These may be the people who have a very hard time coming to worship services on Sunday mornings because they work on Sundays at a restaurant or hair salon, or they live alone in some elderly housing and rely on the good-will of other church members to drive them to church. Most weeks their only interaction with the church is when the Chinese pastor visits them at their restaurant or at home on Thursday afternoons to have a short Bible study with them. Reaching them would require not only creative thinking on how to get past the language and cultural barriers, but also an evaluation of who are the visible and invisible members of the broader society. In many ways these less visible Chinese immigrants are the poor in spirit. They are the meek; they are the ones who mourn, and to them also, if not more, belongs the Kingdom of Heaven.