Taiwan: The Praise Night

This is the next installment of the Taiwan Trip. Hope you are enjoying them!

Waking up the next morning, we did daily devotionals, ate a great breakfast and started working on getting over to the Chao Yeh church to finish up the bible camp for the kids, and lead a praise night. The Bible camp wrapped up without much drama, partly because the people who were already there (you see, I was a late comer to the missions trip. They had already been there for a month) had things down pat. I was supposed to lead the praise night and I had been appraised of this before I left, so I had a couple of worship songs planned out. I had asked prior whether or not people knew English, as I do not know how to speak Chinese and I was constantly reassured that they were. Unfortunately, the people who I was asking this of (my mom) were in the United States. So as you can guess, no, they do not know English, we will be singing in Chinese. No they do not know any of the songs I have picked out, so we need to sing the songs they know. And no, I didn’t know any of the songs.

So here I am, in Taiwan the first day, fighting a little jet lag, having to lead a worship night with songs that have only seen 2 hours prior and cannot sing at all. So what am I to do? As in the immortal words of the Mendenhall missions trip in 2006, “Semper Gumby”. I learned the songs. I lead by humming. Yes, you can lead a congregation by humming. It actually went well. I got to know a number of the people who were on the missions trip and was able to talk with a couple of the people who knew some broken English. Between my broken Chinese and their broken English, I think we were able to communicate. The kicker? My cousin who was the student leader on the missions trip pulled me aside and told me the schedule for Sunday. What was the schedule? “Well, first they are going to be doing the worship, as they have a worship leader already. Then after that you are going to preach, and after that Joseph is going to give his testimony. Once that’s done, we’ll go through a whole ‘farewell’ send off, and that’ll be it. Any questions?”. Wait, I have to preach? Tomorrow?