We spent some time of late waiting on the road leading up to
the ferry to cross the Mekong into Long Xuyen. We’ve been this way before, and
on normal days the traffic backs up a bit, but the three or four ferries running
simultaneously manage to keep the back up to a 30-45 minute wait. But add in the
ending of the Tet holiday, when half of the populace is enjoying the last few
days of their time off work, and another portion is trying to get back to their
daily lives so they can resume work, and the shippers are trying to catch up
with the shelves-emptying buying that preceded the holiday, and it should not
surprise one that the waiting time doubles or triples.
Prior to the building of bridges such waits were just a part
of the travel and one factored in the wait and the vagaries of such travel into
one’s expectations. Then they started to build the grand suspension bridges
across the Mekong that we have today, and suddenly the paradigm changes. And while
traffic across the bridges can still slow down on holidays (as it did over the
Ben Tre bridge the last time we visited there on a three-day weekend) the
thinking has changed.
So it is with infrastructure. The bridge spans the chasm and
suddenly every subsequent traveler ceases to dread the journey or ponder their
life while they wait on the descent and ascent of the chasm.
That’s very much what we have been doing with this mission.
We have been building the bridges across chasms of disbelief. We have been
building the freeways (or at least the straight roads) that subsequent
generations of God’s Army will follow to further the establishment of the
cities of Zion. Things like robust visa processes still stymy us at times.
Getting materials for use in the growing number of branches, or for use of our
branch builders still occasionally get stalled in crossing. But more and more
the basic matters become routine, proceduralized and sometimes simpler.
We have noticed that at times the work seems to perk along
at a rather linear pace, proportionate to the number of workers. And we have
been blessed to be a mission whose ranks have increased wonderfully over the
past two years as others have commented. But sometimes, irrespective of the
gross numbers, there seems to be a jump in the curves, a shift in the slope, an
underlying change in the assumptions of what is possible.
We will discuss a question in the coming Mission Presidents
Seminar that we posed with our leadership counsel a few months back. A question
that asks what is possible, what it would take, to bring every area, every
companionship, into the productive phase of the work.
We see fields that lie fallow during certain seasons of the
year, but then are brought into production with re-plowing, planting and the
maturing of the tropical sun and rains. Similarly, we have been learning how to
prepare the paddy, how to engineer the watering and drainage in our young
branches, how to nurture the paddy rice so that it can be transplanted into
appropriately spacing and then flourish until it is ready for the harvest.
We have spent a little time again in the Mekong, which
though it is the breadbasket of this country, is not yet ready to be brought
into regular cultivation in the harvest of the Lord. But the land is sometimes
so fertile that the harvest can hardly be restrained. This is the one place
where we have seen the conversion of entire extended families to the gospel of
Jesus Christ. There is a humility, and a hunger, that when exposed to the
truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ, seem to allow a rapid harvest. And in
that we rejoice both in the harvest, and the Lord of the Harvest.
We sometimes are still caught doing linear thinking when the
Lord is seeing a quantum leap. And we understand more fully his assertion that
he will “hasten his work in his time” in conjunction with the prophetic words
of Elder Holland, “You are witnessing the birth of the church in a day.” We are
grateful that this is our day.
