In addition to that confusion, we learned that there's a holiday, Chinese National Day, coming up and we have to complete make-up classes on the Saturday before the holiday actually starts. Then again on the Saturday after the holiday is finished. I got confused with all of my makeup classes and normal classes and ended up attending class at the wrong time and forgetting class at the right time. It was quite a mess.
We were excited at first because our understanding was that we would have several small classes equaling up to 10 classes total. It turns out that we really only have 2-3 large classes that are split into 4-6 groups and we meet each group twice a week. This severely limits our contact with new groups of students and because of our weird schedules, we can only attend English Corner once each week.
Some good news is that on Wednesday we attended English Corner and I caught up with my buddy Frank again. He called me while I was there because he couldn't find our group. For some reason, the location of English Corner was moved and no one was alerted to it. Anyway, I chatted with Frank for a bit and we rescheduled our meeting for Sunday night. That way Colonel and I both can be there. Some new girls at English Corner heard Frank and I talking and they wanted to know what meeting we were talking about. I told them what we study and where we meet. Frank immediately chipped in and started telling them how wonderful the Good Book is and how they should study with me. That was a big help because the girls (about 6 of them) all decided that they wanted to come. We all exchanged phone numbers.
And of course, as soon as anything good like that happens in this city, its immediately followed by something bad that keeps everyone who was interested from showing up. The girls all realized that there is a holiday this week and they wouldn't be here on Sunday because they're traveling home to visit family. We've seen this story played out before. We probably won't see them for two weeks, and then the next time we meet, they won't have any interest at all... Just as soon as my hopes were high, they were dashed again on the rocks of frustration that seem to exist in this city. Despite all of my requests to the Father and all of our hard (and very bold) work with spreading the Good News, we can never seem to get any real studies going. It seems that we're just going to be planting seeds in this city and someone else will get to do the watering. I just hope that someone else comes along soon. It feels like we're fighting a losing battle here.
On a semi-good note, I've been chatting with Allen through email. She's also very busy this term. We can't find a time when both of us are free, so I asked her if she wanted to continue studying with me through email. She agreed, so I'm taking some lessons from the World English Institute and emailing them to her each week. This was she can continue learning about the Father and if she has questions, we can still chat about them through email. It's a risk on both our parts, but it's worth it if we can get just one person to have a closer relationship with the Father.
Mark hasn't been around much and he hasn't been chatting with Colonel as often at English Corner. All of our invitations to him have basically been ignored. Then, out of the blue, Colonel received a call from Mark. Mark said that lately he has a lot of free time and he wants to take a walk with Colonel. I didn't get a whole lot of details from the conversation, but Colonel made it sound as if Mark has a lot on his mind and needs to talk with someone about it.
Other than that, very little of importance has been happening here. We're still trying to find our rhythm in this new schedule. The great thing is that we have e-bikes now, so we can get places a lot faster. A trip that used to take us 20 minutes of walking, now only takes 5 minutes on our e-bikes. That has helped a lot with exchanging the kids between our classes, getting food quickly, and rushing off to English corner. At this point, if we were walking everywhere, then neither of us would get anything done.
Please keep lifting us up to the Father. Ask Him to bless the work here and to send some more workers to this city. There are over 1,000 freshman students in this school (and thousands more upper class students) and there's only Colonel and myself teaching them about the Father. We need more workers. All of us who believe were called to the Great Commission. The call is to go into ALL the world, not just the places that you like or feel comfortable in. I hope that someone out there takes those words to heart and really starts reaching outside of their comfort zone. We need you, and the people in this city need you.