Will Craig considered himself to be physically fit.
He used running for exercise and for stress relief, which he needed especially when studying for pharmacy school finals.
“I’d been running as much as I could up until exam time,” Craig said. “And then studying took over.”
But as much as he enjoyed running, he found running in Alabama was nothing like climbing in thin air.
“Even in the best shape, your body has to change its physiology to respond to the demand required to perform simple tasks,” Craig said. “So when I got to the mountains all the work I had put into getting into shape didn’t have much of an effect.”
The first time he headed up a 12,000-foot mountain, he was gasping for air halfway up. But when he reached the top and saw the unreached people group on the other side, he found his burning lungs did not matter so much.
Buddhist prayer flags rustled over the tents in the valley, and the sound of monks blowing conch shells echoed off the ridges.
The lostness hit Craig head on.
“Everything just seemed so alien,” the student said. “I’d never been overseas before, so I didn’t really know what to expect.”
The altitude was not the only thing that required acclimatizing, he said.
“It took a while to adjust to the lifestyle and the people,” Craig said.
J.D. Sommers agreed. Like Craig, it was his first time out of the country or in high altitude. After months of preparation, the two left Birmingham and were on top of that mountain in East Asia working with an International Mission Board extreme evangelism team just a few days later.
“The altitude was the biggest adjustment and something you can’t really do much for. Other than that I felt fairly prepared and well equipped to do the work that was ahead of us,” Sommers said.
But the people surprised him.
“My first thoughts were mainly just trying to grasp how different the culture was from my own,” he said.
The old men of the villages spend their days keeping big metal prayer wheels spinning, a symbol that means prayers are always going up to Buddha. Young women long for the day they can dedicate their first sons as monks.
At first it was hard to relate to the people there, Craig said.
“But I was reminded the whole time of how the Father is glorified in our diversity and how the whole experience — the people, the culture, the terrain and language — testifies to His majesty,” he said.
Yaks roam around outside the houses and tents. Families inside make yak butter tea and watch satellite televisions that flash images of U.S. cities and western products.
The implications of that hit Sommers hard.
“It struck me that these people, while they do live very remote lives, still possess a lot of modern technology to connect them with the outside world,” Sommers said. “But it shocked me to think that, through all of that, there was still little to no witness to the gospel in that area. Many of them had never heard (of it) prior to our work there.”
That is why he and Craig went, he said — to share and to pray that the people would have ears to hear.
“There are so many visible barriers to the gospel here, be it cultural or political,” he said. “My biggest prayer is that those barriers would be broken down so that these people might see the light of the gospel and come to know Christ.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — Names have been changed for security reasons.
(IMB)
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