A post by Cole Van Horn, WolfLife Campus Minister at AState. Recently I was playing ping pong with a new Japanese student, Shoho. He’s a Freshman from Tokyo, and in a water break between matches we sat and talked. I felt the Spirit prodding me, so I asked him what he believed in. After some clarifying and him thinking a while he said, “Myself, I guess?”, which is an answer that I hear from East Asian students often. He went on to elaborate that while he had never thought about that question before, his life has been about what he can accomplish.
Like any good friend, Sho returned the question after we had talked about his views for a while, stating he knew I was a Christian, but not much beyond that. He was curious what Christianity was about, and I had already told him and a couple of his friends about the way Jesus described inner and outer purity by way of washing dishes (which they thought was a great metaphor), so we talked for a while about what I believe. He got really excited when I dropped a reference to the Golden Rule, which he said he loved and tried to live by. I asked Sho if he knew where that came from, and he was shocked to learn it was a Jesus thing. He is now doing a conversation partnership with DJ, one of our Campus Ministers, learning about Jesus through the Gospel of Luke weekly.
I tell you that story to tell you these facts. The international population is recovering fast from COVID. We have a few of our students doubling up on conversation partners and we still don’t have enough to meet the need. In fact, at last week’s Friday Night Dinner we had three new girls sign up; one from Japan, and two from ASU’s Mexico campus. We could definitely use some people to spend some time with these new students. You’d be committing to at least one hour a week sitting down face to face with a student from another country talking about life, Jesus, friendship, and maybe helping them with some homework. If you commit to this program we would provide you with the name and contact info for an international student, a Luke workbook, and some training on how to use it. We would then let you set up an initial meeting with your student whenever and wherever works for the both of you to get to know them, and then in the next meeting you would begin to use the workbook.
If you’re interested, please call me at 870-490-0413. The other thing is that I know on the Saturate Jonesboro prayer sheets there are 8 spots for write-ins. Let me give you some names if you’re needing some people to pray for: Shoho, Momoko, Rimu, Tomo, Rokib and Swity, Roy and Bhakti, Izzo, Sulleiman, Yukari, Naoko, Huyen, Amine… to name a few. I hope you’ll join me in praying for these students and consider becoming a conversation partner for an international student.
Cole Van Horn