Don't you just love a good miracle? I especially like the small, serendipitous kind.

Ruth (my Amity teaching partner) and I have worshiped at the Shanzishi Protestant Church every Sunday since we arrived in Lanzhou. Yesterday evening over dinner we decided that it was time to learn how to get there by bus; the taxi is expensive. I promised to go home and study the bus route map, in all its Chinese inscrutability, and figure it out. Later I was about to call Ruth and confess that I was giving it up. I couldn't make any sense out of the map. At that moment, Ruth called to report that on her way home she had met a young Tibetan student on the street who immediately revealed that he's a Christian -- "JesusChristian," as he puts it. All one word. In the course of their conversation he offered to meet us in the morning and show us how to take the bus to the church. Daniel is a third year student at Lanzhou University, majoring in History, and he is student teaching in a middle school near Ruth's apartment. The three of us rode the #115 bus to church together this morning.

Ruth and I are the least well informed worshipers at Shanzishi. We don't understand more than a stray word or two of the sermon; we can't even sing along because the hymnals are all in Chinese characters (no phonetic pinyin). They don't have a bulletin, or we might at least ask someone to translate it for us so we could get some sense of what goes on in the parish. So it was likewise a miracle that we met a Chinese American woman last Sunday who said she was on her way to rehearse with the choir, “. . . because we're doing The Messiah next week.”The Messiah! The woman vanished before we could ask for details. During the week a Chinese neighbor called the church for me and learned that the performance would be today at 1 PM, free of charge.

So today we heard Handel's famous oratorio performed entirely in Chinese. I don't have words in English to express how beautiful it was. I told Daniel afterward that I would have traveled all the way to China just for that.