I’m currently undertaking a Masters in Transformational Development through Eastern College (formerly Tabor Victoria), and am required to attend a week-long intensive every semester in either Melbourne or Kuala Lumpur.  This past week I joined the international students in KL:

We’ve spent the last two months doing set readings on contextual theology, weekly skype meetings with our cohort.  We’ve gathered in the conference room at Malaysia Care, right next to Chinatown with its culinary delights and tightly-packed market stalls.  I count thirty people, spread across thirteen countries.  Steve Bradbury, TEAR-turned-Micah Challenge Director and course coordinator asks, pen in hand, for any unresolved questions that we’d like answered this week.  He fills a large whiteboard.

We sit under some great Asian teaching, my Western mind poked, prodded, my cultural assumptions partially demarked.  I meet an amazing bunch of community development practitioners; a pint-sized middle-aged woman, sweetest person you’d meet, loves a laugh – tear-gassed four times for protesting against corruption in her country; a 70 year-old who is full of life, and pours it all out serving the homeless addicts in his city; folks working in difficult, remote terrain, others in situations of violence.  I hear so many amazing – and a number of terribly sad – stories, the week filled with a mix of passionate discussions, shared meals, the floating of ideas and questions, market wanderings and the dishing out of encouragement.

Soon enough it’s Friday.  I take a midnight flight home, kept awake by a personal whiteboard of queries that follow me home, no eraser in sight.  Touching down in Perth, I turn on my phone to three messages from friends wrestling with big questions.  I have a wife and three kids that I miss, an assignment due soon, Indo again in two weeks, teaching at the Churchfreo gathering tomorrow morning.  I groggily stumble past a billboard trying to get me to purchase an adventure somewhere in Africa. I grin and politely decline.  Attempting to participate in the kingdom of God is a wild enough journey for me.

Today, for some strange reason though, I’m up for it.