"I'll Go Where You Want Me To Go"
I can remember clearly singing these words with absolute conviction in the fall of 1990. It was just after my High School graduation and I had been at Brigham Young University for a few months. I was living in Deseret Towers, the on-campus dorms , and attending church each Sunday in the Law Building just a few blocks south of my dorm. I was surrounded by other bright-eyed and idealistic 18-year old men and women and while on the surface we seemed quite similar, I felt pretty out of place.
It seemed like everyone else in my single's ward was from Ogden or Salt Lake or at least Colorado or California, places that had large wards and many existing relationships with other students also from their home wards. I had grown up mostly in small branches in the middle of Nebraska and spent high school in a very small ward in North Carolina with just a few youth. As I sang the familiar songs of missionary zeal and sacrifice there at BYU I would reflect how I had come out to Utah driving a beat up 2nd hand '72 Chevelle that my mechanic had advised me not to take out of the county, let alone across the country.
I made it as far as Nebraska before the ol' heap died on me. I remember pulling into a rest stop with steam and oil splashing out of the engine and seeing white smoke pooring out of the tail pipe down I-15 behind me. I had some good friends from Nebraska following in their van and they said they would give me a lift to Provo, but only if I could ditch the car right then and there. An old farmer approached me at the rest stop and offered me $50 cash for the car. I thought about it for about 2 minutes and reflected on my choice, reach BYU in time for Summer Semester with no car, or face the great unknown. I loaded my earthly possessions ( a single suit case, a back pack and a half-empty case of Penzoil 10-30 oil) into the van and signed over the title to the farmer without a second thought.
Most of my friends at college seemed to get regular care packages with gummy worms, home-made cookies with bread in the bags to keep them moist, and other such comforts while I wrote letters home a few times a month and had occassional calls from my parents. It wasn't that my parents loved me less, just that the connection was much further away. I had never seen anything like BYU before except at Youth Conference when as many as 200 regional youth would get together for a dance or a multi-stake activity. Now I was in Provo with thousands of people who were all LDS. I would overhear people talking about home teaching in the hall ways, or about the Visiting Teaching Message in the check-out lines. While I had been a member of the Church all my life, I felt I was among giants when it came to "real" LDS life.
As fall turned into winter all of those friends from college and my mission prep class started getting mission calls. I remember Shawn Bradley, a 7'6" basketball starting player and a good friend of mine both getting calls to Australia and thinking how great it would be to go there too. It would be "shrimp on the barbie" and a cool accent for me. I opened my call with anxiousness as Pres. Benson's letter called me to serve in Brazil. I was perfectly willing to serve a mission and served with all my heart, might, mind and strength in the ultra-humid heat of north eastern Brazil. My life played out as you might expect after that, returning home from my mission, going back to BYU and marrying my sweet heart who I met at an off-campus housing ward in Provo. I eventually got my degree and went to work as in intern in Brazil while my wife taught english as a second langauge with me in São Paulo. After that life seemed to excellerate, returing back to San Francisco and then to the office of my accounting firm in Salt Lake where our first child was born. I worked for a few years in Ogden as an accountant and then decided to start my own business in 2001. While I was challenged and rewarded for my efforts in my profession, I noticed over the years that I was feeling really stagnent as a member of the Church.
I would reflect often on that missionary excitement I felt in the dorms in Provo, or on my mission. Here I was with 3 kids, a mortage, a demanding job and plenty of opportunities to serve in our ward in Utah, but I felt like I was slowly wilting away. I wanted to feel that adventure of struggle for the gospel again. Walking 3 blocks to Church each Sunday surrounded by hundreds of like-minded families I just didn't feel like I was living up to my potential. Sure my 3 kids were growing up in the gospel and we were teaching them the proper things, but I felt spiritually stagnant.
I remember one Sunday singing another of those familiar songs about giving all for what the Lord wanted and feeling like a bit of a failure in the Lord's eyes. He hadn't condemned me for any great sin or mis-direction in my life, and I wanted to serve a mission with my wife when we retired, but was that really all the Lord wanted from me?
My wife and I begain praying to know the Lord's will and really laying our life out before him for the first time in a long time. It wasn't that we were bad people, just that we felt our progression had detailed somewhere along the way. As we prayed about this we began to feel strong promptings that if we had a desire to serve, the Lord would call us to a different work. We were thinking of all the possabilities of moving out of state or to the east coast to a more "mission field" sort of area. I thought seriously about Brazil, I spoke the language and loved the people, surely the Lord could put us to work there?
China. That was what we kept getting back. I love Chinese food, such as we have it in the US, but I had never considered it as a place to live, no, not by a mile. I have no special love for or affiliation with Chinese culture or people, so why China? We prayed and prayed and really felt compelled to go to China. Did those words to the song really mean anything at all or was it more like "I'll go where you want me to go... within reason!"
One day in late 2009 I recieved an unexpected job offer to teach Accounting in English at some universities in China. It was totally outside the realm of possability from my perspective and yet here was a 12-week teaching position to teach in two cities in China. I had never been away from my wife for more than a few days and yet here it was, a 15-hour per week "job" that would allow me to continue to run my own company while teaching on the side and investigating China for the family.
In January 2010 I boarded a plane for China and spent 6 weeks in Tàiyuán, China. It is a city you have never heard of with over 4 million people in it. It also has no LDS branch at all and only one small "protestant" congregation of about 60 people. I spent 6 weeks there in the snow and rain teaching accounting and struggling on my own. There are perhaps 10,000 foreigners (non-Chinese) living in this city so everywhere I went I was stared at. I spoke no Chinese and couldn't even worship meaningfully. I spent my Sunday attending the generic Protestant Church with a few other foreigners and asking myself and my wife and the Lord... Why?
I found out with a couple of Sundays left in the area that the Church runs a "virtual branch" for members living in China that are not within travelling distance to attend a church. This virtual branch is attended via Skype or by calling into a phone line. Each Sunday for two hours members of this "virtual branch" participate in a Sacrament service and then alternate between Sunday school or Priesthood/Relief Society every other week.
Then I was transferred to Suzhou, China for my last 6-week assignment. Suzhou is a town of about 6 million with about 10 million in the greater metropolitan area. It is also home to the Suzhou International Branch, one of about 15 branches of the Church in Mainland China. I remember the joy I felt as I was able to receive the sacrament for the first time in over 6 weeks in this small branch of about 60 memebers.
We met in a 3-story home that was converted into the Church on Sundays for the purposes of meeting as a branch. In China the consistitution of the country allows for religious freedom, but requires all worship to conform to certain government regulations. This means that the Church cannot own land or even rent a facility on its own since it is not legally recognized by the Chinese government. Only in a few special cities where the local government and the provincial government are one in the same has it been possible for the Church to rent facilities dedicated to worship services. In Beijing and Shanghai the Church has district headquarters and branch meetings at these special offices that are rented by the Church while everwhere else in China the church can only meet in a member's home.
After attending church in the Suzhou Branch on Sundays for several weeks I started reflecting on the time I had in China. What was it all for? Surely if the Lord wanted our family to come to China then he would prepare a way, but I would have to do my part. I should be urgently looking for housing or something along those lines. Instead I felt a peace with the situation and no thought for my family's future arrival seemed necessary. The 2nd to the last week in Suzhou I was approached by the Branch Presidency and told that the Suzhou Branch needed to move to a new building for several reasons, but that the Branch needed a family to host the Branch. They had been praying about it and felt our family was the one!
You have to know my wife, Paula, to truly appreciate this. She is extremely private and does not enjoy large parties. The idea of living IN THE CHURCH had never crossed either of our minds and it utterly terrified her. We would never have volunteered for such a thing but when we prayed about it we felt very strongly that it was what the Lord wanted for us. After returning to Utah in April we began making preparations. We sold our cars, gave away some stuff, put our house up for sale and rented a storage shed. In late October 2010 my wife and three kids (ages 14, 11 and 9) borded a plane from Salt Lake City and flew to Germany to attend a convention for my business. Half of our allowed bags were used for business products so we flew from Germany to Shanghai, China in early November 2011. We had with us one suitcase each and one carry-on bag.
We had a car service pick us up and take us to our new "home" where a family from the branch met us and had kindly thought to provide us with some food and some bedding to borrow for a few days until we could get our own. We lived out of those suit cases for about 8 months with just a few purchases to supplement our meager possessions. Our house in Utah sold a few months later and we were then officially committed to China. We have lived in the Church now for over 18 months and each Sunday the Young Men come early to set up chairs in our living room and move the coffee table to prepare the sacrament on. The pulpit is pulled out and the microphone set up. Pictures come off the walls and a blanket is thrown over the entertainment center.
The branch has fluctuated some with lots of move-ins and move-outs and visitors and business people, but we have a pretty consistent core group of about 60 members with average attendance of perhaps 70-75 per week. Because Chinese law does NOT allow for the mixing of Chinese Nationals with Foreign members of the Church, we cannot allow any Chinese people to attend any of our meetings, unless they are married to a member of the Church who is also a foreign passport holder. We have no missionaries and are in a District, not a Stake. Everywhere else in the world a District reports to the Mission over that district, but since we have no Mission in China we report directly to the Asia Area Presidency. We have no temple in China but are considered to be in the Hong Kong Temple District, though we have had temple trips to Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.
There are no missionaries in China and that possability is far off on the horizon, any rumors you have heard to the contrary are totally false, wishful thinking.
My daughter Abby was one of just 6 young women and my son Chase is one of just 5 young men in the branch. There have been lots of move-outs this spring so we will only have perhaps 4-5 youth in the fall unless something changes. Seminary is "early morning" and they have met at the international school for several years before it was changed to meet at our home from 6 to 7 AM Monday-Thursday. We had one student who would Skype into seminary each day because his home was too far away for daily attendance. Because of the size of the branch we all have multiple callings. At one point earlier this year I was a counselor in the Branch Presidency, the early-morning Seminary Teacher, the Sunday School President, the Gospel Doctrine Teacher and the acting (but not called) Branch Mission Leader. This last calling might sound like the easiest but we had a wonderful family from India investigating the church at at the time and their family was taught all the discussions and baptized during this time so it was actually the most time-consuming calling at the time. My wife is also the Relief Society President.
For Youth Conference last year all of the youth in China flew to Hong Kong to attend baptisms for the dead and have a youth conference there. There aren't many youth conferences that require a passport I'll bet, but it was a wonderful experience for Abby.
In the just over 18 months we have been in China we have given up much. We have forsaken our home, our cars, most of our wardrobes, our language, our people and our families. We miss the family events like cousins' baptisms and family reunions. We have given up tacos, 24-hour fast food restaurants, toilet paper or even soap in public bathrooms. We have lost out on the fight to legalize gay marriage, the political correctness and all of the US TV shows and commercialization of holidays. I don't know who played in the NBA finals or who won the last world series. Since we live in a different region than the USA we can't stream most TV shows online and most popular websites are blocked like Youtube and Facebook, except when using special software/hardware in our home.
We don't have nearly the amount of material possessions and went all of last year on bicycles and two electric scooters, with only occasional taxis and rented car and driver. Your USA driver's license is meaningless in China and public transporation is the only viable means of getting around in most busy cities in China.
But we have also lost all of the time we spent chasing after money to keep up with our neighbors. We don't watch a lot of TV or spend time mowing the lawn or taking care of a boat or cabin. We have more time as a family and give more meaningful service both to one another and to those in need. My wife volunteers at a chinese orphanage where the abandoned kids are in desparate need of her service. We have only one another and the gospel to cling to, and we have found as all of these other external non-essentials have fallen by the wayside, that love and service to others is truely more easily sought after and attainable. We have worked hard to understand the people and learn the language, and while we are far from fluent, we are certainly far from helpless anymore either.
So why are we here in China? Why did the Lord call us? Was it to help our family to come together in adversity? Was it to help our children to grow up free from the oppressive influence of an entitlement culture or abject commercialism? Was it to help our children become fluent in a language that they will need for their own missions in a few years? Was it to help my wife and I overcome our own pride in ownership of so much "stuff" or to learn to love people enough to give up our own privacy for the sake of the gospel?
Or was it just to truly test us and see if we would really live the simple lines of a song?
I don't know the answer to that question yet. I only know it all started not because we had the courage to ask the question, but because we had the courage to listen and follow the answer.
I can remember clearly singing these words with absolute conviction in the fall of 1990. It was just after my High School graduation and I had been at Brigham Young University for a few months. I was living in Deseret Towers, the on-campus dorms , and attending church each Sunday in the Law Building just a few blocks south of my dorm. I was surrounded by other bright-eyed and idealistic 18-year old men and women and while on the surface we seemed quite similar, I felt pretty out of place.
It seemed like everyone else in my single's ward was from Ogden or Salt Lake or at least Colorado or California, places that had large wards and many existing relationships with other students also from their home wards. I had grown up mostly in small branches in the middle of Nebraska and spent high school in a very small ward in North Carolina with just a few youth. As I sang the familiar songs of missionary zeal and sacrifice there at BYU I would reflect how I had come out to Utah driving a beat up 2nd hand '72 Chevelle that my mechanic had advised me not to take out of the county, let alone across the country.
I made it as far as Nebraska before the ol' heap died on me. I remember pulling into a rest stop with steam and oil splashing out of the engine and seeing white smoke pooring out of the tail pipe down I-15 behind me. I had some good friends from Nebraska following in their van and they said they would give me a lift to Provo, but only if I could ditch the car right then and there. An old farmer approached me at the rest stop and offered me $50 cash for the car. I thought about it for about 2 minutes and reflected on my choice, reach BYU in time for Summer Semester with no car, or face the great unknown. I loaded my earthly possessions ( a single suit case, a back pack and a half-empty case of Penzoil 10-30 oil) into the van and signed over the title to the farmer without a second thought.
Most of my friends at college seemed to get regular care packages with gummy worms, home-made cookies with bread in the bags to keep them moist, and other such comforts while I wrote letters home a few times a month and had occassional calls from my parents. It wasn't that my parents loved me less, just that the connection was much further away. I had never seen anything like BYU before except at Youth Conference when as many as 200 regional youth would get together for a dance or a multi-stake activity. Now I was in Provo with thousands of people who were all LDS. I would overhear people talking about home teaching in the hall ways, or about the Visiting Teaching Message in the check-out lines. While I had been a member of the Church all my life, I felt I was among giants when it came to "real" LDS life.
As fall turned into winter all of those friends from college and my mission prep class started getting mission calls. I remember Shawn Bradley, a 7'6" basketball starting player and a good friend of mine both getting calls to Australia and thinking how great it would be to go there too. It would be "shrimp on the barbie" and a cool accent for me. I opened my call with anxiousness as Pres. Benson's letter called me to serve in Brazil. I was perfectly willing to serve a mission and served with all my heart, might, mind and strength in the ultra-humid heat of north eastern Brazil. My life played out as you might expect after that, returning home from my mission, going back to BYU and marrying my sweet heart who I met at an off-campus housing ward in Provo. I eventually got my degree and went to work as in intern in Brazil while my wife taught english as a second langauge with me in São Paulo. After that life seemed to excellerate, returing back to San Francisco and then to the office of my accounting firm in Salt Lake where our first child was born. I worked for a few years in Ogden as an accountant and then decided to start my own business in 2001. While I was challenged and rewarded for my efforts in my profession, I noticed over the years that I was feeling really stagnent as a member of the Church.
I would reflect often on that missionary excitement I felt in the dorms in Provo, or on my mission. Here I was with 3 kids, a mortage, a demanding job and plenty of opportunities to serve in our ward in Utah, but I felt like I was slowly wilting away. I wanted to feel that adventure of struggle for the gospel again. Walking 3 blocks to Church each Sunday surrounded by hundreds of like-minded families I just didn't feel like I was living up to my potential. Sure my 3 kids were growing up in the gospel and we were teaching them the proper things, but I felt spiritually stagnant.
I remember one Sunday singing another of those familiar songs about giving all for what the Lord wanted and feeling like a bit of a failure in the Lord's eyes. He hadn't condemned me for any great sin or mis-direction in my life, and I wanted to serve a mission with my wife when we retired, but was that really all the Lord wanted from me?
My wife and I begain praying to know the Lord's will and really laying our life out before him for the first time in a long time. It wasn't that we were bad people, just that we felt our progression had detailed somewhere along the way. As we prayed about this we began to feel strong promptings that if we had a desire to serve, the Lord would call us to a different work. We were thinking of all the possabilities of moving out of state or to the east coast to a more "mission field" sort of area. I thought seriously about Brazil, I spoke the language and loved the people, surely the Lord could put us to work there?
China. That was what we kept getting back. I love Chinese food, such as we have it in the US, but I had never considered it as a place to live, no, not by a mile. I have no special love for or affiliation with Chinese culture or people, so why China? We prayed and prayed and really felt compelled to go to China. Did those words to the song really mean anything at all or was it more like "I'll go where you want me to go... within reason!"
One day in late 2009 I recieved an unexpected job offer to teach Accounting in English at some universities in China. It was totally outside the realm of possability from my perspective and yet here was a 12-week teaching position to teach in two cities in China. I had never been away from my wife for more than a few days and yet here it was, a 15-hour per week "job" that would allow me to continue to run my own company while teaching on the side and investigating China for the family.
In January 2010 I boarded a plane for China and spent 6 weeks in Tàiyuán, China. It is a city you have never heard of with over 4 million people in it. It also has no LDS branch at all and only one small "protestant" congregation of about 60 people. I spent 6 weeks there in the snow and rain teaching accounting and struggling on my own. There are perhaps 10,000 foreigners (non-Chinese) living in this city so everywhere I went I was stared at. I spoke no Chinese and couldn't even worship meaningfully. I spent my Sunday attending the generic Protestant Church with a few other foreigners and asking myself and my wife and the Lord... Why?
I found out with a couple of Sundays left in the area that the Church runs a "virtual branch" for members living in China that are not within travelling distance to attend a church. This virtual branch is attended via Skype or by calling into a phone line. Each Sunday for two hours members of this "virtual branch" participate in a Sacrament service and then alternate between Sunday school or Priesthood/Relief Society every other week.
Then I was transferred to Suzhou, China for my last 6-week assignment. Suzhou is a town of about 6 million with about 10 million in the greater metropolitan area. It is also home to the Suzhou International Branch, one of about 15 branches of the Church in Mainland China. I remember the joy I felt as I was able to receive the sacrament for the first time in over 6 weeks in this small branch of about 60 memebers.
We met in a 3-story home that was converted into the Church on Sundays for the purposes of meeting as a branch. In China the consistitution of the country allows for religious freedom, but requires all worship to conform to certain government regulations. This means that the Church cannot own land or even rent a facility on its own since it is not legally recognized by the Chinese government. Only in a few special cities where the local government and the provincial government are one in the same has it been possible for the Church to rent facilities dedicated to worship services. In Beijing and Shanghai the Church has district headquarters and branch meetings at these special offices that are rented by the Church while everwhere else in China the church can only meet in a member's home.
After attending church in the Suzhou Branch on Sundays for several weeks I started reflecting on the time I had in China. What was it all for? Surely if the Lord wanted our family to come to China then he would prepare a way, but I would have to do my part. I should be urgently looking for housing or something along those lines. Instead I felt a peace with the situation and no thought for my family's future arrival seemed necessary. The 2nd to the last week in Suzhou I was approached by the Branch Presidency and told that the Suzhou Branch needed to move to a new building for several reasons, but that the Branch needed a family to host the Branch. They had been praying about it and felt our family was the one!
You have to know my wife, Paula, to truly appreciate this. She is extremely private and does not enjoy large parties. The idea of living IN THE CHURCH had never crossed either of our minds and it utterly terrified her. We would never have volunteered for such a thing but when we prayed about it we felt very strongly that it was what the Lord wanted for us. After returning to Utah in April we began making preparations. We sold our cars, gave away some stuff, put our house up for sale and rented a storage shed. In late October 2010 my wife and three kids (ages 14, 11 and 9) borded a plane from Salt Lake City and flew to Germany to attend a convention for my business. Half of our allowed bags were used for business products so we flew from Germany to Shanghai, China in early November 2011. We had with us one suitcase each and one carry-on bag.
We had a car service pick us up and take us to our new "home" where a family from the branch met us and had kindly thought to provide us with some food and some bedding to borrow for a few days until we could get our own. We lived out of those suit cases for about 8 months with just a few purchases to supplement our meager possessions. Our house in Utah sold a few months later and we were then officially committed to China. We have lived in the Church now for over 18 months and each Sunday the Young Men come early to set up chairs in our living room and move the coffee table to prepare the sacrament on. The pulpit is pulled out and the microphone set up. Pictures come off the walls and a blanket is thrown over the entertainment center.
The branch has fluctuated some with lots of move-ins and move-outs and visitors and business people, but we have a pretty consistent core group of about 60 members with average attendance of perhaps 70-75 per week. Because Chinese law does NOT allow for the mixing of Chinese Nationals with Foreign members of the Church, we cannot allow any Chinese people to attend any of our meetings, unless they are married to a member of the Church who is also a foreign passport holder. We have no missionaries and are in a District, not a Stake. Everywhere else in the world a District reports to the Mission over that district, but since we have no Mission in China we report directly to the Asia Area Presidency. We have no temple in China but are considered to be in the Hong Kong Temple District, though we have had temple trips to Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.
There are no missionaries in China and that possability is far off on the horizon, any rumors you have heard to the contrary are totally false, wishful thinking.
My daughter Abby was one of just 6 young women and my son Chase is one of just 5 young men in the branch. There have been lots of move-outs this spring so we will only have perhaps 4-5 youth in the fall unless something changes. Seminary is "early morning" and they have met at the international school for several years before it was changed to meet at our home from 6 to 7 AM Monday-Thursday. We had one student who would Skype into seminary each day because his home was too far away for daily attendance. Because of the size of the branch we all have multiple callings. At one point earlier this year I was a counselor in the Branch Presidency, the early-morning Seminary Teacher, the Sunday School President, the Gospel Doctrine Teacher and the acting (but not called) Branch Mission Leader. This last calling might sound like the easiest but we had a wonderful family from India investigating the church at at the time and their family was taught all the discussions and baptized during this time so it was actually the most time-consuming calling at the time. My wife is also the Relief Society President.
For Youth Conference last year all of the youth in China flew to Hong Kong to attend baptisms for the dead and have a youth conference there. There aren't many youth conferences that require a passport I'll bet, but it was a wonderful experience for Abby.
In the just over 18 months we have been in China we have given up much. We have forsaken our home, our cars, most of our wardrobes, our language, our people and our families. We miss the family events like cousins' baptisms and family reunions. We have given up tacos, 24-hour fast food restaurants, toilet paper or even soap in public bathrooms. We have lost out on the fight to legalize gay marriage, the political correctness and all of the US TV shows and commercialization of holidays. I don't know who played in the NBA finals or who won the last world series. Since we live in a different region than the USA we can't stream most TV shows online and most popular websites are blocked like Youtube and Facebook, except when using special software/hardware in our home.
We don't have nearly the amount of material possessions and went all of last year on bicycles and two electric scooters, with only occasional taxis and rented car and driver. Your USA driver's license is meaningless in China and public transporation is the only viable means of getting around in most busy cities in China.
But we have also lost all of the time we spent chasing after money to keep up with our neighbors. We don't watch a lot of TV or spend time mowing the lawn or taking care of a boat or cabin. We have more time as a family and give more meaningful service both to one another and to those in need. My wife volunteers at a chinese orphanage where the abandoned kids are in desparate need of her service. We have only one another and the gospel to cling to, and we have found as all of these other external non-essentials have fallen by the wayside, that love and service to others is truely more easily sought after and attainable. We have worked hard to understand the people and learn the language, and while we are far from fluent, we are certainly far from helpless anymore either.
So why are we here in China? Why did the Lord call us? Was it to help our family to come together in adversity? Was it to help our children to grow up free from the oppressive influence of an entitlement culture or abject commercialism? Was it to help our children become fluent in a language that they will need for their own missions in a few years? Was it to help my wife and I overcome our own pride in ownership of so much "stuff" or to learn to love people enough to give up our own privacy for the sake of the gospel?
Or was it just to truly test us and see if we would really live the simple lines of a song?
I don't know the answer to that question yet. I only know it all started not because we had the courage to ask the question, but because we had the courage to listen and follow the answer.