more quotes from The Spring Wind

(p.89) "What we saw as an opportunity, Wing Sung saw as exploitation... exploitation of his friendship. What we wanted to give, he was afraid was going to get him. How could we be true to our Christian motivation of sharing the love of God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and yet show this boy that we respected him first of all as a person... as the person he was at that moment, and not the person he might become if he someday conformed to our thinking?...

'My brothers and the people in the village will never believe it, not until they see it.'"

(p. 99) "It was only a simple meal of rice and meat, with greens form Yau Tai's stall, but it will always stand out in our minds as a most significant occasion. We gathered around the table, held hands as a family and friends, and Gordon thanked God for the food in Chinese... Just as we were ready to raise our heads, Ah Chun began to speak. I looked at him, and realized his eyes were closed and his head was bowed. I closed my eyes and listened. He was speaking to God in a prayer that made my heart stand still. He prayed in Jesus' name, a prayer direct and simple. I was silent for a moment.

'Ah Chun!' Gordon said, extending his hand. 'I didn't know you were a Christian!'

'Ding Mok-si! I didn't either! I wasn't, but I am! This is the first time I've ever prayed aloud to God... the first time! You were all praying, and I felt my heart move and tell me to pray. I've prayed to God aloud for the fist time!'

I sat with head down, not daring to look up. To hear a man establishing a speaking relationship with God was an awesome thing... an awesome thing to happen over rice and tea and half-washed hands, clasped in a squirming circle of peeping children and tired adults at the end of a day..."

(p.104) "Language is a people-oriented art, and only those who have a genuine interest in people for people's sake seem to mater it..."

(p.105) "O God! make us free... free like the grass to bend with the wind, with no consciousness of our rightness or wrongness, but only of your greatness."

(pp.111-112) "'Few people are blackhearted,' Gordon said. 'There are times when we understand and times when we do not understand. Misunderstanding acts like blackheartedness.'... But dare we tell him now that the builders of the first bridges he had known were also the stokers of his early fires of mistrust?... That good and evil were not two men, but in every man... in us?

I glanced again at his puzzled face, and knew. Yes, we dared. We dared because we were not playing roles. We were not the wise seeking to teach the foolish, the good seeking to eradicate the bad. We were persons, capable of understanding and misunderstanding, of understanding a thousand things and failing to understand a thousand more, and as persons we could dare to share ourselves not only as we were but as we had been.

The fences were down, and the lines were gone between us. We were no longer foreigner and Chinese seeking to adapt and bow to each other, dealing in bargains and tinged with mistrust. We were a company of people walking along the road, surrounded by darkness but walking toward light... people with faces turned toward the wind... The Spring Wind, before which we must all bow as grass.

The night wind blew up from the sea, and we turned our faces toward home."