This evening I received a let­ter of nom­i­na­tion from my uni­ver­sity sup­port­ing my exchange appli­ca­tion. My heart is greatly torn at this news. God is not with­out a sense of irony! Tori and I both pray for a future serv­ing God together, but the process to attain­ing this is not, it seems, one with­out pain or dif­fi­culty. We antic­i­pate more long months apart, and I face leav­ing Syd­ney, its com­forts and securities.

In Syd­ney, there is secu­rity in so many things. I trust in fam­ily, in friends, in per­sonal and pro­fes­sional net­works, in job secu­rity and my own abil­i­ties. I trust in credit cards, Inter­net providers, news­pa­pers and mobile phones. All of these things come to noth­ing, dis­solv­ing in the face of study­ing a lan­guage so rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from my own first lan­guage. Yet, were I to achieve any degree of com­fort­able­ness in this lan­guage, at least some of the things in which I falsely find secu­rity would, with­out sound rea­son, assume that posi­tion of trust in my life once more.

The one true thing to trust in is com­mon to all lan­guages, all peo­ple, and every place on earth. There’s just one sure and cer­tain hope that is unfail­ing. When every thing and per­son on earth gives way, Jesus alone is our hope and stay. (So thank­ful to God for Tori’s reminder of that in the midst of my freak­ing out about all of this tonight — you are a wise and godly woman Tori!)

Busi­ness strat­egy, inter­net devel­op­ment, and the excit­ing insan­ity of startup work in an amaz­ing indus­try with the best col­leagues will trans­form into, near-exclusively, the well-trodden path of labo­ri­ous lan­guage study, learn­ing through hum­bling fail­ure and the neces­sity of con­stant cor­rec­tion by even the clos­est of friends. Yet lan­guage learn­ing opens doors, com­mu­ni­cates truths, and, sim­i­larly to the insan­ity of star­tups, is spurred along by neces­sity and an urgent need for improvement.

For my part, I’m learn­ing to trust God more and hav­ing the false objects of my hope called out in front of me by even the sug­ges­tion of hav­ing to leave them behind. It’s funny, because I thought I’d thought about this — I guess as things become con­crete prob­lems get harder to ignore! Strangely, the things I had thought will be dif­fi­cult to let go and live with­out — a car, a great IT setup, books, pur­chas­ing power due to con­strained exchange bud­get, etc. — hadn’t even come up in my mind yet (though they may later).

Per­haps the issue for me is less mate­ri­al­ism, as I had thought, and more pride and an overde­pen­dence on the things that don’t sat­isfy and give life to the full! The absur­dity of this sit­u­a­tion is per­haps best encap­su­lated in the obser­va­tion that I am torn at the spec­tac­u­lar breadth, depth and width of oppor­tu­ni­ties pro­vided. It is ridicu­lous to think that I, such a mediocre stu­dent, should be given the chance to study at a top-5 uni­ver­sity as well as the remark­ably well-regarded Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney. The ridicu­lous­ness of this is, per­haps, only sur­passed by the fact that I then pro­ceed to com­plain about it!

And both these priv­i­leges are like rub­bish com­pared to the sur­pass­ing great­ness of know­ing the Lord Jesus Christ — this is the most absurd oppor­tu­nity of all. To be loved by the Cre­ator, whose cre­ation (of which I am part) destroyed Him, though death could not hold Him down, such that death promises eter­nal life through Christ’s vic­tory: it is beyond comprehension! 感谢主！