Busy Training Day

This morning (Thursday) we rose early and traveled into a neighboring village to teach more from 2 Peter, church planting, and PC training.  Several of the young men and women who gathered here this morning between 10 and 5 had worked all night long.  They are hungry to learn.  The questions flow after each session and it is a joy to answer them.  It is so evident that regardless of whether we are in Vietnam, Southeast Asia, or North America, the Word of God has all the answers and the answers are the same regardless of culture or language.  The Bible is a multi-cultural book and Christianity is a multi-cultural faith.  If fits no matter where you are.  The problem arises when we tailor a Christianity to fit our culture, as we have done for the most part in America.

We ate some home cooked Vietamese food for lunch.  It was definitely an experience.  I prayed during the blessing that God would give me the ability to eat the food and to give me a stomach of iron.  It was noodles, some very strange looking mushroom slices, bamboo shoots, and duck meat.  It was surprisingly good.  For desert we had bong bongs... not spelled correctly.  Bong bong means fruit and whatever we ate was a fruit with no name, so they call it bong bong.  I have never seen it before and they were very unique, but pretty tasty.

After we left the first training session, we went to eat some local and authentic Chinese.  It was definitely NOT American Chinese.  Some of it was a little tough to swallow "literally."  They brought out some type of pork that I have never seen before.  It looked like a spleen, but we discovered it was the meat from underneath the pigs belly wrapped in a spinach leaf and cooked.  It didn't make it around the table and to our plates and I don't think I heard anyone complain.

After we ate, we traveled to Bill's for the last time and sat Indian style in his floor for about an hour and a half straight talking about the Gospel and answering questions.  We left Bill's at 11:30, got back to the room a little after midnight and hit the sack at about 1:00.  All is well.  The work here with the Vietamese seems to be a good work and worthy of investing in.  The people are converted, discipled, and trained here and then sent back to Vietnam to plant churches.  God is working in Vietnam and among the Vietnamese and it is our hope and prayer that this week of training and encouraging will move the work along even further.  Off to bed...