Wait for God, Others, and Myself

　　There is an old Chinese saying: “One day apart feels like three years.” The poet, longing for his beloved, felt that a single day was like three years. Yet now I feel that three years are like a single day. It has been three years since I enrolled at HKBTS, and soon I will be graduating. Even after three years of full-time study, I still ask myself: Who am I? What qualifies me to serve God, the great Creator?

Learning to Care

　　When I shared my testimony of God’s calling, I explained how God opened my eyes to the needs around me and moved me to care for others. This was one of the reasons that led me to pursue full-time theological studies. At the start of my first year, a classmate asked what I was most looking forward to learning at the seminary. I replied that my greatest desire was to learn how to live meaningfully within a community, how to care for others and be cared for, and how to walk alongside others as companions in faith. Three years passed, and I now realize that to walk alongside others, I must learn not only how to care for them but also how to wait—to have patience for God, for others, and for myself.

　　Over the past few years in both seminary and church settings, I have had many opportunities to practice listening and pastoral care. As a result, I have acquired various counseling skills, and I thought I began to understand how to care for others. However, during a practicum on pastoral care techniques, while I believed my responses were effective, a classmate later said that she felt stressed and rejected by me, reminding me that my “care” can become an imposition of my own ideas—justified by “it’s for your own good”—when in truth I desire to control rather than to walk with them in step with the Holy Spirit and wait for God to work in their lives.

Learning to Wait

　　From various classes, I have come to understand that God is patient. He does not force Creation to grow but patiently allows each created being to develop at their own pace, gradually becoming what God intended them to be over time. Likewise, a church is not a community that manipulates its members; it is a body of brothers and sisters who, empowered by the Holy Spirit, walk together, each at their own pace under God’s guidance and governance. However, when walking alongside others, I believed I could “help” them. Yet, I failed to embody this spirit of waiting for God and others. Looking back, in fact, God had been teaching me right from the start to learn patience and to understand that humans cannot control everything. From submitting my seminary application to taking the entrance exam, completing administrative procedures, and finally moving from Macau to Hong Kong, unexpected delays reminded me again and again that there are always matters beyond my control. These unexpected circumstances made me realize that I was not trusting in God and waiting for Him as much as I thought. I was pursuing a sense of security and trying to have everything under my control. Perhaps we all know in our minds that we should let go and entrust everything to God, but in this modern society that seeks to control everything, learning to be a “useless” person as such turns out to be something that we need to learn.

　　In addition to waiting for God and others, I realized that I must also wait for myself. During a first-year spiritual formation group, one exercise invited us to examine our “dark side.” Over these years of study, I have gained a deeper understanding of my own weaknesses. In the midst of darkness, I am grateful that through His Word and the companionship of brothers and sisters, God has shown me that He has been waiting for me to grow, helping me to understand and embrace my weaknesses through these experiences. I need not force myself to be a minister who “meets the standards” but rather a “helpless one” who learns to rely on the Holy Spirit.

The Good Work God Has Begun in Our Lives

　　Finally, I thank God for allowing me to enter this seminary, where I met brothers and sisters from different churches and made friends with neighbors at nearby restaurants. While Hong Kong did not feel like home or a foreign land, these friends made me feel truly at home. They cared about whether I had enough to live on in Hong Kong. At church, I also met a fellow from my hometown who looked after me, allowing me to experience God’s abundant grace in a deeply personal way. I wish I could also become a channel of God’s grace.

　　Who am I? I am a mere “useless” servant, and yet one of God’s beloved children. Together with my brothers and sisters, I wait for God to complete the good work He has begun in our lives.