A True Tale of Two Teenagers and Two Tibetan Towns
A Ministry Report From My 19 y/o Self (22 Years Ago Today)
The following is a combination of two emails that I wrote in July (10, 12) of 2003 to family, friends, and supporters back home, updating them on the past month’s ministry. Keep in mind that I was nineteen at the time (especially when I refer to my teenage years as “yester-year”)! :-)
You can also listen to me share most of this article (except the final story) on this episode of my podcast, China Compass, recorded exactly 22 years after the original emails (July 12, 2025).
From Passionate Prayer to Present-Day Proclamation
As a young Christian preparing for a future life of ministry, it was easy to sit and daydream of the day when you would finally arrive at the place where you were 'reaching the unreached' and sharing with those who had 'never heard the Gospel'. Well, as of this past month, those daydreams of yester-year have become a present-day reality in my life.
No longer am I sitting at home thinking of or lying facedown on the floor praying for the completely unreached. I am here. I have seen them with my own eyes. I have walked their streets with my own feet. I have spoken to them with my own lips. I have now become one to whom God has entrusted the task of proclaiming Christ's salvation to the ends of the earth.
The opportunities given to me during the past month were not random, but regular. Everyday that went by, I was blessed to deal with a wide range of people who reside in some of the most gospel-neglected areas of the world. From Tibetan Monks to demon-fearing nomadic tribes to entire clans of Muslims who bow the knee to Allah, God turned my former supplications into present opportunities to proclaim His salvation among the peoples of this world.
I just want to say thank you for supporting me in prayer. My own prayer is that laborers would be called out to reach not just a few, but all of these people with the Gospel. This is precisely what Jesus Himself asked us to pray for.
Then He said to them, "The harvest truly is great, but the laborers are few; therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.
2003 (18 & 19 y/o) Sibling Tibet Trip Report
I promised to write about some of the experiences that I have had during the past few weeks. It would be impossible to relate all of them to you, but I will try and pick out a few. I personally find it very difficult to put into words the things that I have seen with my eyes and felt in my heart. I will do my best.
On the 24th of June (2003), my brother arrived in China to join me for a couple weeks of evangelism in northern and west-central China. For those of you who don't know him, my brother just turned 18 (about 2 years younger than me; I'll be 20 in August), and will start classes at Oklahoma University next month.
Our time in China was to be spent primarily in secretly distributing evangelistic literature throughout the cities, towns, and villages of the areas to which we traveled. Our goal was to reach out beyond the borders of the typical Chinese areas and into the minority areas where many people live without a real knowledge of Jesus Christ at all. I am happy to say that this goal was accomplished!
Bumpy Buses and Bible Bombs
Most of our days were spent in the back seats of old and cramped Chinese buses traveling from town to town. The windy and very bumpy lanes which were filled with pedestrian farmers, bicycles, tractors, goats, cows, dogs, horses, and wild children were enough to boggle the mind. Alongside one mountain road, my brother even claims that he saw someone's pet monkey grazing in a nearby field along with a herd of cows.
There was a method to this madness. Our reason for cramming into the backseats of these buses and traveling down these lost and forgotten back roads of China was simple. As our buses careened past home after home, person after person, we were joyfully tossing seeds of the Gospel out of the window to any and every soul we could possibly reach. This is a very interesting form of ministry and athletic ability is a definite asset. The further you can toss a 'tract bomb' (4 or 5 tracts folded together and held tight by a rubber band), the more people and homes you can reach with the message of salvation. I am delighted to say that literally thousands of Gospel messages were distributed in this manner throughout large areas of 4 Chinese provinces during those two weeks my brother and I were out and about. One of the most memorable tosses was when I casually dropped a bomb out the window into the midst of a group of young school-girls riding their bikes along the roadside. I had the opportunity to watch one of the girls screech to a halt and return to retrieve the small package of life-filled words as our bus puttered on down the road.
Besides the joy of tossing tract bombs out of bus windows, we also had the opportunity to take part in “mass home delivery operations”. In seven different Chinese cities and towns, we took to the streets in the middle of the night to personally carry more of these Gospel messages to the homes and businesses of the Chinese and minority peoples.
A Night in the Mountain Monastery
One night was especially memorable. The town of Yushu in Qinghai Province, China, is very nearly as far as you can get from the 'Chinese people' and yet still be in China. The Han Chinese race makes up the vast majority of the nation's people. They fill the fertile valleys and farmlands of most of southeastern, central, and northeastern China. In Yushu, however, the Han Chinese race are by far the minority. The Tibetan people prevail in the rugged mountainous prefecture of which Yushu is the capital.
Along with the Tibetan people naturally comes their fervent belief in the Tibetan form of Buddhism. Shrines and temples fill the regions in which they live. The particular city of Yushu is home to a very large Tibetan monastery. The monastery, which houses hundreds of monks, is located just north of the town on top of a small mountain. The particular night that my brother and I were in the city, I found my heart being drawn up the very steep mountainside towards the dark and mysterious buildings of the monastery.
Stumbling and scurrying up the mountainside by the light of my little flashlight, I knew precisely what I had come to do. In my possession was a large assortment of Tibetan tracts and books, as well as copies of the Gospels of Luke, Mark, and John. After finally managing to navigate the steepest and most dangerous part of the mountain, I ran across a nice foot path that led the last few hundred meters to the first buildings. After winding around the side of the mountain and turning a corner, I found myself in the midst of what seemed like a ghost town.
I was sure that some people lived here, but I just couldn't imagine it being a very lively place. There were buildings that looked like living quarters, but there were no lights on and patches of overgrown grass filled the little courtyards. In one place, cows rested silently in a mountaintop clearing gazing curiously at the white midnight messenger that had wandered into their domain. Despite the almost total absence of signs of intelligent life, I knew that the area was home to someone. People live everywhere in China. So I cautiously began placing tracts, books, and Gospels in places where they would soon be found by a curious Tibetan monk or pilgrim.
It was in this manner that I made my way through the mountaintop neighborhood. I crossed the first ridge and descended slightly, continuing to lay placements of Gospel literature, then I continued up a successive ridge that let through still more homes towards an oddly shaped mountain pinnacle. The homes soon turned into empty grass lots as the mountain peak neared. The last few steps were a bit tricky to navigate, but I was finally able to stand upon the old ruins of what seemed to have been a Buddhist shrine on this mountaintop.
Racing the Rising Sun
I spent a few minutes here looking back over the area from which I had come, and also gazing to the east at the hazy light of pre-dawn that was being revealed in the sky above the surrounding mountain ranges. After placing one of the Gospels in a cleft in the rocks, where it would likely be found within hours, I began to descend in another direction towards what looked like a large temple. I had not previously seen this temple and I was excited at the thought of being able to leave the Word of Life at the temple itself, so that the worshippers could hear of the King with the power to truly forgive their sins!
The descent did not take long, and I was soon nearing the back of the temple. However, I was coming down from above and the only way I could see to enter the temple courtyard was to climb down a series of ledges and walls. The first part of this temple descent was uneventful, but I was met with a surprise as part of the clay wall collapsed when I was still about 8 feet above the courtyard floor. The fall scared me a bit, but no major harm was done. My hand, and the resultant cuts, took the brunt of the impact. My main concern was the noise I had made and the fact that dawn was fast approaching. I quickly found the (locked) temple doors and neatly placed tracts and booklets all around.
As I began to make my way down the mountainside to the real exit/entrance to the temple, I noticed little staircases shooting off the pathway every few feet to my right and my left. I quickly realized that each of these led to a row of monk's quarters. The little pairs of monk slippers outside each door gave them away. After maybe 30 minutes of scampering back and forth (quietly) and placing Gospels and tracts at nearly every monk's door, it was getting very bright outside. My night in the Tibetan monastery was nearly over. I only had about 30 minutes before I was supposed to wake my brother up at our hotel so we could catch the first bus out of town to our next desired destination.
I made my way confidently down the mountainside, still placing tracts and booklets wherever possible, singing with joy in my heart at the amazing opportunity that I had just been given to bring the Word of life to this remote Chinese mountaintop. As I descended the mountain on the road, as opposed to my previous cross-country ascent, I passed many of the early morning pilgrims heading up to worship. I couldn't help but smile at them and continue to sing praises to Jesus for the things He had done and was going to do in that place.
Please join me in praying for the millions of Tibetans who live in similar places from north-central China, through Tibet, and into north-western India. This town of Yushu, along with its mountaintop monastery, is one place I intend to visit again in the future, possibly for more long-term sharing and discipleship. (Note: I did return to that monastery mountaintop seven years later, but only after it had been partially destroyed and vacated after a major earthquake.)
Everything up to this point I also shared on the China Compass podcast, recorded exactly 22 years later (July 12, 2025). What follows is only found here in written form. We don’t even have any pictures from this experience (that I can recall)…
Book Incoming
After leaving Yushu, my brother and I had just over 3 days to cover nearly 500 miles of some of the roughest terrain in Asia to the city of Chengdu, where our plane would depart for our return to Hong Kong. We boarded the early (and only) bus from Yushu to Serxu, and spent the next 8 hours slowly climbing over and down a large (13k ft.) pass into Sichuan Province, specifically the small, poor and dirty town of Serxu.
Despite numerous, uh, “interesting circumstances”1, of which I will someday probably write a small book, we were able to invest hundreds of Gospel messages in this town during our one night stay.
Lulled to Sleep by Luhuo
The next day brought us to the small, seemingly wealthy, and much cleaner town of Luhuo. Totally different from the previous stop, this was to be our last night 'out on the town' spreading the Gospel home to home, and we wanted to make it count. It took a while to get away from the seemingly endless streams of people walking the streets in the middle of the night, but we finally managed to start placing tracts under the doors of many of the town's businesses.
As we turned our first corner and began to work our way up the next street, we had an interesting experience. Some friendly Chinese had caught sight of my brother and he ended up wandering over to them and 'talking' with them, although he couldn't understand a word of their Chinese. Meanwhile, while they were distracted with him, I was still able to meander up the sidewalk behind where they were facing and leave tracts at nearly all the businesses along the road. My brother and I work well together as a team, it seems.
Surrounded by the Police
After turning yet another corner and beginning to loop back towards the main part of town, I began placing Gospel messages under the doors of the businesses on my side of the road. After only going a few steps, I glanced at my brother across the street just in time to see a group of Chinese men approaching carrying walkie-talkies. One of them pulled out a wallet and flashed a badge in my brother's face.
Somehow, in our hour or so of walking around town, we had been seen and turned in. Now it seemed we were going to have to face the Chinese communist police. I remember saying to myself "here we go" as I started towards the small crowd that had now gathered around my brother. I was excited. I love seeing the Gospel spread home to home throughout this vast nation, but I also very much enjoy personally sharing the Truth face to face with whomever crosses my path. These communist police were my audience for the evening.
As they escorted us towards their station, I was asked what the booklets were and why we were distributing them. I had the privilege of telling them that the booklets spoke of Jesus Christ and that we were distributing them because we wanted to tell people the truth. One officer didn't think much of my calling the tracts 'the truth' and he told me what he thought about it. I reiterated again that 'yes, they were the truth', and he kind of laughed to himself as he headed out the door. The police asked if we had any more materials. I said we did and began to empty our bag out on the table for them all to see. It was a pleasure watching these mostly atheist officers read through many of the tracts. Some of the officers who spoke Tibetan were also looking at the Tibetan tracts. After taking inventory and confiscating the rest of our tracts, they escorted us back to our hotel room to look for more.
It was our last night, so I wasn't as hesitant as I normally would have been to give up the materials that we had with us. I began to become a bit incensed as they looked through more of our stuff and asked a few more questions. Just the thought that they were all stirred up simply because we were handing out Gospel messages boggled my mind a bit. When they asked if we had done this same thing in other towns, I clearly responded that I had done this in every place I had visited in China. This surprised them a little bit, and they seemed a bit more stunned when I informed them that the Gospel was being spread in “every city, every town, and every village in China. And not mainly by foreigners, but by their fellow Chinese citizens.”
As they gathered up our stuff and prepared to leave, I asked them what they were planning on doing and when we would get our things back (they had also confiscated cameras, cds, cd player, etc..). They said sometime tomorrow. We were informed that we were allowed to move about the hotel, but no further. They could tell I was not pleased as they left. I was really frustrated at not being able to do anything. We couldn't just sneak out of town and leave, because they also had possession of our passports. Well, by this time it was nearing 3 a.m. and we were soon heading off to sleep, awaiting our meeting the next day with the police.
Hurry Up and Wait
We woke up around 10 a.m. and I decided to see what I could find out about when we could leave town. We had a plane to catch in Chengdu in just over 24 hours, and we were still a considerable distance away. As I began to head down from the second floor to the ground floor of the hotel, I found out that the police were already (or still) there keeping an eye on us. I pressured them a bit about our lack of time to mess around, and then went back upstairs to get my brother and pack my stuff.
They hadn't exactly given me a helpful answer about when we would be allowed to leave, so I got my brother and we gathered all of our things. We marched down the hall and down the stairs past the officers who were watching us. They immediately got on the phone to the head of police and by the time we had placed our things in a pile by the front door of the hotel to wait, a small crowd of the authorities was arriving once again.
They told us to go and rest until someone arrived from another place. We found out later that they were talking about the Foreign Police division. We declined the offer to rest and told them we would stand there and wait. And wait we did. Initially, we were told that it might be a couple hours. In the meantime, I talked quite a bit with many of the police and the hotel workers. The police were passing around a few of our tracts and taking turns reading them. Some read seriously, while others kind of smirked and laughed.
The hotel receptionists, who were Tibetans, informed me when the police weren't looking that they were on our side. They asked me if I had any more tracts, and I told them that I did have a few left. I was able to sneak them one over the table, and it was cool to see them wander off one at a time into a back room to study the words about Jesus. It would be nice to go back and share some more with those guys in the future.
My Chinese is getting much better, but there is still quite a bit that I do not understand. It is because of this that I asked the police more than once for an English translator to help tell me what was going on. A few hours later, а couple of local teachers appeared, but it still ended up being a little easier to communicate with them in Chinese.
You Must Obey Chinese Law
At one point, a policeman asked the two translators to tell me that it would be our fault if we missed the flight, because we had chosen to break the law. In response, I wrote down in English for the translators the words "we must obey God rather than men".
The lady translator said, "but you are in China, you must obey our law". I replied again that I must first obey Jesus Christ. She seemed incensed and said "China has no god". I told her that she may not have a god, but that China does, and many, many of her fellow Chinese believe in the Jesus we preach.
They went on to ask me where I had obtained the literature. I just said that I did not want to tell them. I was not about to tell them and put the ministry in jeopardy and risk having millions of Chinese people never hear the Gospel for even the first time! There was zero chance I would tell them where the literature came from.
Interrogation and “Trial”
Well, finally, 7 hours later, after pressuring them about our tight schedule, the foreign police finally appeared. It was a two-man band. One driver, and the single investigator who spoke decent English. After finding a pen and some paper, the interrogation began. The questions were actually fairly easy to answer. He seemed to take it for granted that we were innocent westerners who didn't know the law. He kept trying to get us to promise that we would never commit this 'serious' offence in China ever again, but we kept avoiding the question.
He also asked where the materials had come from, and he took my "I am not going to tell you" much better than I anticipated. Over the course of our relatively short interrogation, I did have the opportunity to tell him the basic content of the tracts- "How to be forgiven of your sins" - and also that I preach the Gospel wherever I go, whether in China, Hong Kong, South America or the USA.
After a 20 or 30 minute deliberation by the Foreign Policeman and the local police, they gave us our punishment. We were really blessed, because all they did was take away our materials. The China Bureau of Religion also let us go without a fine. We felt extremely blessed, although I was still frustrated that we lost some literature that could have been used in other places. I am just praying (and you also can pray) that the tracts would just sit in a back room somewhere, and that the right person will find them at the right time. Our Father can even use the confiscated Word to change lives for eternity! Glory!
15 Hours Through Tibet in a Chinese Mini-Minivan
Well, by the time we were allowed to leave town, it was about 7 in the evening. Our flight left Chengdu the following day at 1 p.m. The only problem was that we were still a long way from our departure city. By 7:30, the police had helped hire a taxi to take us all of the way to the provincial capital of Chengdu, and the following 15 1/2 hours were spent in the small back seats of a little minivan taxi careening over and around the wet and wild mountains of central China.
Rain fell almost all night and the road was in some places as bad as I have ever seen a road be. And did I mention our two drivers hadn’t ever driven to the capital city?
Well, we did arrive in Chengdu at 11 a.m. the next morning, which was in time to make our flight. After stopping at McDonalds for a quick energy boost (and because our Tibetan redneck drivers didn’t know how to find the airport), we grabbed a taxi.
After checking in and going through security, we had about 10 minutes to spare before boarding. My brother was especially excited about making this flight, because his international flight left early the next morning from way down in Hong Kong. If the police had held us any longer, he would probably never have made his international flight back home.
Final Thoughts, Regrets, Prayers, Thanks
Needless to say, we were excited about all that God had done. Not only had we been able to spread Truth throughout a large portion of west and north central China, but we had also shared with the oppressive government workers themselves!
One thing that I truly regret is not telling the Chinese police the simple truth that ‘I love the Chinese people way too much to obey China's anti-Christian laws.' I wish now that I would have said something more. Maybe next time. Overall, the trip was nothing less than amazing. Any opportunity to share God's forgiveness with those who are perishing in their sins is a blessed one.
Please also pray for me that I would learn and choose to have the mind and attitude of our Lord Jesus Christ in all that I say and do. There were a few times on this trip, and especially when dealing with the authorities that I could have said the same things that I did say with a much more kind and loving attitude.
Thank you for reading all of these experiences (if you actually made it this far) I trust that it has in some way helped you to see our world in a little clearer light. If you have any questions about any of the things I have written, feel free to write to me and I can tell you more. Thanks for everything, everyone.
In Jesus Name,
Ben
July 12, 2003
(With minor editing/updating on July 12, 2025)
Machine gun fireworks, police dog attacks, woke (literally) boarding school principals, guilty conscience, locked gates, wet cement, more locked gates, diarrhoea, and a pretty girl. Am I forgetting anything? Probably.