summer days in Bristol

Daisy and Wen Wen

Costa study date with a classmate

dinner with housemates

Thursday night Bible study

Josh and Jesse signing the albums

Transition's acoustic concert

Yesterday, I received my MA dissertation's result and praise God He has blessed me with a distinction (it is really God's grace because I wasn't prepared for this course in musicology at all and had been feeling like I only knew 0.01% of what's in the field most of the time). Now that I have received my result, those summer days of toiling on that 15000-word piece and stressing about writing seems like so long ago. So here I am reminiscing my summer days in Bristol, the moments in between those gruelling hours of research and procrastination. 

old home

I was back in York, my first home in England this past weekend with COCM's gospel team so I snapped some photos of this beautiful city using my phone. It was good to see old and new brothers and sisters in the church and to enjoy the beauty of autumn in this northern part of England.

York event

Bibles and hearts for students

host home

York Minster

Lancaster gospel team event

So, I have been going out with the cocm gospel team for 13 events already this autumn and I would like to share a bit of what going out with the team looks like each time. The day usually goes like this: morning group prayer and worship time before leaving COCM, car ride to the destination, passing out flyers, setting up equipments at the venue, prayer and worship time with local brothers and sisters from the fellowship/church, rehearsal time, dinner and conversation time with the students who come, the programme starts, conversation with the students who make the decision to accept Christ or are interested to know more about the faith, pack up, go home/to host homes.

not forgetting some selfie times in between

drama

sermon time

brunch at a missionary's house

Bristol 10.2014

Autumn days

Sometimes I make simple things too complicated, even writing a blog post, which is why I haven't been sharing much. I often try to blog only when I can craft a detailed post about my life lately but because life has been so full and busy, I never get to it because I want to wait till I have a proper time to do it. Anyway, I have slowly learned that this "ideal" is not going to happen so it's better for me to just share some snapshots from these autumn days before winter comes again (it is actually already coming since we just adjusted our clock one hour back for the winter time).

It has been another weekend of serving with the cocm gospel team outside of Milton Keynes so I get a day of rest today (Monday). Here are some autumn goodies we made at the centre.

homemade apple cider

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.