NGO HI LO FAHN, NGOM MENG BAH TONG WAH

Today, Debra and I attended a Thanksgiving Dinner for our church group. I was asked a few days ago to be the speaker at the event.

When asked if I would be the speaker, the above sentence almost immediately came to my mind. “Gno hi lo fahn, ngom meng bah tong wah.”

Translation:

“I’m a white guy, I don’t understand Chinese”.

So, today I shared my story:

During the summer between my junior and senior year in college, I took a summer school class in public speaking. While taking that class, I met a friend who invited me to church. My new friend was Chinese. The church was also Chinese.

The night I first visited Chinese Grace Bible Church in Sacramento, a guest evangelist spoke about a guy named Nicodemus. After he finished his sermon, he had the audience bow their heads and close their eyes while he asked for a show of hands: “Is there anyone in this room who does not know for sure that he would spend eternity in heaven if he were to die tonight?”

I was not even persuaded such a place existed. So, I certainly could not be sure I was going there.

My hand went up.

Before I left that building that evening, I had talked to the evangelist, to another college student and to the pastor. And, going against my strong sense of agnosticism, I had also agreed to read the Gospel of John three times and to pray to a god who might or might not exist and to ask him, if he were real, to somehow show me.

I read. I prayed. He showed me.

Within the next few days, several “coincidental” things occurred. First, I heard a speech from a fellow student in that college public speaking class. That speech made me doubt everything I had ever believed about the theory of evolution. Then two ladies knocked at my door and gave me some literature that supported everything the evangelist had said. Then a guy picked me up at a freeway entrance where I stood waiting with an upturned thumb hoping to hitch a ride to my parent’s house a few miles away.

I stepped into his car, saw a sign on the dash proclaiming “Jesus is Lord”, then heard the first words coming out of his mouth in the form of a question: “Do you believe in the Lord?” It puzzled me that I answered “Yes”. We talked together for about twenty minutes before he dropped me off in my parent’s driveway. When I stepped from his car, I stood on the driveway and watched him pull away. That’s when it hit me! In answer to my skeptical prayers, He had shown me.

I was a believer!

.

I continued with that church for several years. Often, when I would call friends in the church, their non-English-speaking parents would answer the phone. Eventually, I learned to tell them, "Gno hi lo fahn, gnom meng bah tong wah."

During our Thanksgiving Dinner event today, Debra chats with Barbara and Jill, Richard chats with Fred, and I hide behind my camera.

Debra shoots a photo of Jack while someone else sneaks into the camera’s field of view.

I was the speaker.

The “fifty-five-and-still-alive” group led the singing.

My spiritual roots began at Chinese Grace Bible Church. Here I’m serving as a counselor at a church camp at Mt. Hope.

Another church camp at Mt. Hope. This time I was camp director.

Another year, another camp.

Another year, another camp.

Eventually, color film was developed.