What I've been up to

It has been three months since I came to live as a student volunteer at COCM (Chinese Overseas Christian Mission) and two months since the first outreach trip of this autumn so I just want to write a bit here and share about life here and what God has been teaching me.
Firstly, being a student volunteer here means living in a community with other student (actually we are all pending graduates who have just handed in our master's dissertations) volunteers (there are eight of us in total) and some other missionaries who also live in this building. Our daily tasks as volunteers include mainly cleaning, cooking, and other miscellaneous tasks that they assign us to do, to help with the upkeep of the missions centre. We get to have morning devotions together, eat together, pray together weekly and learn from a spiritual formation class. Life gets really busy here especially when there are camps and conferences being held here because we have to serve these campers and do lots of pre- and post-event cleaning.
Secondly, I am involved in the student outreach ministry team aka the COCM Gospel Team (one of the various ministry aspects of COCM). This means we go out to different university campuses in the UK (+France and Ireland) to hold 'gospel events' for Chinese students. Basically, Gordon and Maggie (two main missionaries who lead the teams) and around 10 student volunteers (who may be different people for each of the places we go, depending on their availability and place of living in the UK currently) set out to these places to have a themed outreach event for Chinese students who are willing to come. We would have dinner, music, games, a drama, sermon, conversation times with the Chinese students we meet and through the theme of the program (which is 'Renewing your heart' 从心开始 this year) share the good news of God's grace with them. It is eye-opening and heart-changing to meet these students, many of whom had never heard of the Gospel prior to coming to the UK, and see some of them responding to God's love, some being moved to think about the meaning of life while others not caring much. I learned a lot from the other team members in their examples of being prayerful, serving humbly, reaching out to strangers happily, and sharing their testimonies honestly. So far, we have been to more than ten places and we are halfway through.