I spent nearly all of 2003 travelling throughout China, learning the language, doing research, and sharing the Gospel. I remember one night in particular in July of that year. I was a couple of days into a two week trip where I was travelling alone, bouncing from city to city, sneaking out late at night to leave Gospel booklets all over town where they would be found the next morning by curious citizens.
Late that summer night, after I had already spent an hour or so wandering around town, I came upon a man who looked to be homeless. He was poorly dressed and was sitting next to a large sack of his belongings on a low concrete wall that was located in the middle of the town’s main shopping street. In China, almost every city has at least one street that is closed off to all but foot or bicycle traffic. This is considered the ‘downtown’ area and is the commercial center of the city. In the middle of the night, the place was littered with trash from the previous day and completely deserted, except for me, this homeless man, and a ‘sweeper’ (city worker who sweeps the trash off the streets in the middle of the night) far off down the road.
I felt the urge to sit down next to this man to try to talk to him and hopefully share the Gospel with him in some way. I had only been living in China for a little over 6 months at the time, so I knew I would be limited in my communication. But, I thought it would be worth the try. As I approached him and sat down, I remember being very surprised that he didn’t seem shocked to have a foreigner randomly come up and greet him at 4 in the morning in the middle of a deserted street. He smiled and began to talk to me excitedly almost before I could even start trying to talk to him.
We ended up sitting together and chatting for quite some time, although I had a difficult time understanding his thick accent, and I am sure he had a hard time understanding my beginner Chinese. I remember asking him where he was from, and expecting to hear that he was from a nearby village or town. I was amazed when he told me he was from a province located far to the south, nearly 2,000 miles away, and that he had walked there on foot. He was in the north now that it was the middle of the summer, and would head back south before the bitter cold of winter came crashing in from Siberia.
I have to admit that my memory of that night is beginning to fade, but I think I tried to ask him what he knew about Jesus, and I received an answer that I couldn’t really understand. I had to console myself with the knowledge that God is sovereign and pray that He would send some Chinese evangelist to clearly preach the Gospel to this man. I am pretty sure that I at least gave him one of my tracts (which contained by testimony translated into Chinese) and a small amount of money.
The one thing that I remember so vividly about this man, as we sat and talked for at least an hour or more, was that he did not change his attitude or his way of talking just because I was a foreigner. He didn’t seem to care at all or even notice. He was hungry for conversation and he talked my ear off as I nodded, trying desperately to decipher as much as I could from what he was saying to me. Any other Chinese person would have stared in amazement had a foreigner randomly approached them for conversation, especially in such a small city located in a relatively unknown corner of China. Not this man. It was as if we had known each other for years, and had walked there together from wherever it was that he had come that day.
I quickly came to feel very close to this man. He was homeless and seemed very content with his lot in life. At that time, I was also without a place to call my own, half-way around the world from my family and the world that I had always known. While this man wandered the streets looking for scraps of food or something that might be of value to him, I was wandering the streets as an alien in a foreign land, leaving portions of the Word of God for lost and needy souls to find early the next morning.
Both the homeless man and myself were considered outcasts by the Chinese government and most of the world. But we were able to become friends sitting alone in the dark early morning hours, watching the first hint of light begin to shine on the eastern horizon. As he wandered off down the street with his sack, I saw him immediately start looking for cans, bottles, or whatever might be of use to him. I hurried off in the other direction, anxious to finish distributing a few more of my precious Gospel booklets before the town came alive and the night would be no more.
*** I wrote down this story for the first time on July 15, 2008, although the event itself happened on July 29, 2003. I had told the story numerous times before, but I’d never made an effort to record it. I am glad I did. Writing it made me want to go and find that guy to continue our conversation!
See this follow-up post with my prayer journal notes from way back in 2003:
http://china.myadventures.org/?filename=4am-conversation-revisited
