In 1992 I traveled with a group of Christians to China’s westernmost province, Xinjiang. Our journey began in Hong Kong from where we flew four hours to Beijing, where we started a 72-hour train ride to Xinjiang. I remember how our train loosely followed the line of the Great Wall along the edge of the Gobi Desert. And there, just outside my train window, I witnessed the Great Wall of China disappear into the desert sands like a fallen warrior. Our destination as a group was Urumqi, the provincial capital of Xinjiang, a metropolis rising like Oz from the desert floor. Beyond the city to the west lay the great Tian Shan – The Heavenly Mountains in Mandarin. A God’s-eye view reveals a vast V-shaped mountain range, rising as high as the Himalaya discounting Everest and K2. The Ili Valley, formed within this mountainous V, opens west and stretches across the Chinese border toward the boundless Central Asian steppes. The group would spend several days in worship and intercession in...
We stress and fret and plan and pray – and a leaf falls, tenderly, swirling back and forth on the late summer breeze, suspended, briefly, out-of-time, to begin its up and swaying journey down to the ground. It rests near a pebble, smoothed and polished by some water flow which no longer courses this way. The pebble, so kind to my fingertips, pleasurable, honed and buffed—not the product of days or minutes, but of aeon. This pebble was larger, sharper in Jesus’ day; larger and sharper still in Moses’. Yet it was still a pebble even then. About the time that Adam’s children walked, east of Eden—or was it before? -- this pebble in its shiny sharpness slid off the rock cliff face, tumbled down the embankment and landed in its first pool, where the rubbing began. But see— Look at the ribbons of color permeating the pebble’s being: black and white with onyx and crystal, layer upon layer, some thick, some not. Each color an aeon, a Day,...