this summer i'm going back to baojing for a month and a half. i'm going with a team of other grad students to do an agricultural needs assessment survey, and at night i'm going to try to do some bible studies and ministry. there are two other christians going, one of whom is going as a full-time short-term missionary. as should be expected, i feel really drawn back to the place, and i'm really looking forward to it, and...i don't know. i hope it's different. i hope i don't lapse into mere enjoyment of being back, an enjoyment of people and places. i hope things happen.

i wonder if moses ever thought about what his old friends and acquaintances in egypt would think when he returned to them to bring the message of God. would he have feared their attention, their puzzlement at his new mission? would he have welcomed it, to be able to share the transforming power of God? would he have said, this is my heritage of faith, to which i was previously and willfully blind? would he have felt guilty for his former life of immediate and undeserved privilege among them as an outsider?

no more unholy self-projections. a year in hawaii doesn't really equal 80 years in the desert.