A job we do here in Kathmandu is teaching English every weekday in the morning. We’ve done it for a little over three weeks now and the students are amazing! Recently we broke our class into two levels and it has been great because we have been able to initiate deeper, meaningful, conversations.
We have been telling our students about the bakery that we get to help with and yesterday we took ChhiTo MiTho cookies to our classes. While I was handing out cookies to the lower level students, I had the idea that it could be a great opportunity to practice reading in English the scripture on the card. The verse is John 6:35:
“Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.’”
Our class is an hour and a half long and the first thirty minutes is set aside for strictly practicing conversation. Reading and explaining the verse was going to be the conversation that day, I thought. As I got into explaining the scripture I had to write it on the board. And after I wrote it on the board I had to keep writing definitions of the words in the verse. And as I was explaining definitions I had to tell more words to explain one word. And as I was telling these words I had to tell bible stories to back up what the words meant. As I told bible stories I had to tell more bible stories to back up those other bible stories. Needless to say we never got to the book work! And that’s okay :).
Class flew by because I was sharing stories from the bible, in really simple form, for the entire hour and a half. I’m almost positive they thought I was a crazy person standing up there because I just kept getting excited and would share more and more the more we talked about it!
My favorite thing of yesterday’s experience was hearing the Tibetan students read off the verse from the board! It was beautiful!! They tend to be shy in their reading but knowing that they were muttering truth, whether they know it or not, under their breath was music to my ears!
Because of the new business cards ChhiTo MiTho has, I have actually gotten to experience non-believers read off the John 6:35 verse on multiple occasions! The verse on the card makes for great conversation and shows immediately that we are a Christian business. I love handing it to someone, seeing them examine it and read a direct quote from Jesus! It is the perfect discussion starter to The Word.
In class, as we talked about the meaning of the verse written on the board a monk copied it down into his notebook. Not something I asked him to do but because of his desire to know the vocabulary he marked it down. The neatest thing to see were the wheels turning in his head… as he wrote the verse, and as I told stories, he began to ask questions. My FAVORITE question he asked that proved to me his interest in this Jesus guy was, “where is Jesus now?”
Here is where the “crazy person” in me came out… I got to explain Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection all while answering the monks question of “where is Jesus?” I was beside myself excited to explain how Jesus rose from the grave and is living!
It is because of His perfect life and obedience to death on the cross as well as His ability to rise from the dead that I have hope! Because of this truth I can rise from the dead I deserve, because of my sin, and live eternally with God in heaven.
I am so thankful that I got to spend my class time sharing the “where” abouts of Jesus! Not only that but I turned his question into a lesson for the day, we practiced question words. I got to answer all the who, what, when, where, how questions of the good news!
God is so good how He works all the time. I am humbled and thankful to be used by Him! Standing up, yesterday, and teaching these things gave me a renewed thankfulness that I serve a God who is living! It was such a great reminder for myself that Jesus is alive, Acts 1:3:
“After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive…”
Unlike any other gods my God is a God that is active and booming. Praise be to Him!
"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuiness of your faith- of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire- may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls."
1 Peter 1:3-9
ChhiTo MiTho updated their labels for the cookies as well as just got business cards for the first time.
Our English class
(We celebrated Father's Day with a little too much exctiment. :))
-LauraLBrown
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