We are so thankful that you follow along with our ministry and we are going to be especially thankful for your following along this week as tomorrow, John and I plan to leave, Lord willing, to go to China for the first time since the pandemic broke out. It’s been almost four years since we have been in China. The work of Passion Life really started in China. It was before I came along to join as the executive director. For a long time it was just John and Kristen going over to visit friends and work with leaders over in China.

John and I met early on in his time there and I came on the Board of Passion Life because I had been living in China myself for 10 years. My wife and I raised our kids in China and it’s been 10 years since John started, almost 11 years now, going to China for the first time with Passion Life. We are really excited about this trip because it represents a couple of very specific high points for us.

Number one, it’s where we started. So to go back and make sure that the work, after four years of absence, is still on track and that the leaders are still healthy and they are still interacting well with one another is going to be a great privilege. Number two, it’s been four years and so just to go into China causes a little bit of anxiety for us, only because we don’t exactly know what to expect. Our visas were canceled. Everyone’s visas were canceled during covid. We are very thankful that China decided to reinstate all of those previous visas now that the pandemic is slowing down over there. But we don’t know exactly what to expect when we get to customs. We do not know exactly what to expect when we cross the border. We don’t know how covid policies continue to be enforced or not enforced in different portions of China.

We are going to need a lot of prayer. Again, we should be leaving the United States tomorrow and staying in China for a couple of weeks. This is a great time for you, if you will, to just stop and pray for us. We’re excited for your partnership because these are the moments that we really count on you to send us where we go. Passion Life works in the hard places, and this is one of those places that qualifies as one of the hard places. Thank you for your prayers. Follow along with our trip, both by email and text, while we are gone and continue to check on these blog posts while we are there. Thank you.