Jehovah's Blessings Abound: Taiwan Trip 2017 Christmas New Year

Revisiting an alien dimension: There is an increasing sense of alienation as I begin to realise how Australia and Taiwan seem to be two completely different worlds. This was a very condensed trip, with only four days in Taipei. After all, I only had a week of break, heading for the airport on 23Dec right after finishing work, landing back in Sydney on 1Jan evening and working again at 8am 2Jan! But then again, my holidays had always been very short ever since I started working in 2007, and I have always worked as a full-time doctor. The longest period I took off work was 5 weeks for the Mackay Memorial Hospital Family Medicine exchange program, and that was not really a holiday. Otherwise, I never took a break that lasted longer than 3.5 weeks at a time (not even for my father’s funeral or my grandmother’s funeral). So, it was those five weeks in Mackay Memorial Hospital that made me realise what life in Taiwan is like.

A good beginning, with a free upgrade to premium economy China Airlines!

24Dec, 2017 4:30am touchdown in Taiwan! Then I went to a dermatology CPD activity at the familiar NTU medical school lecture hall! My first time doing a medical CPD activity in Taiwan and it was pretty interesting! They served boxes of free nice coffee, which usually cost NT200 per box!

25Dec Ruifang District and Keelung:

Did a day trip on Christmas Day to the Gold Museum, Yingyang Sea, Jiufen and Keelong. It was extremely crowded in Jiufen!

27-29Dec Yilan with maternal relatives:

The worship song “Jehovah’s Blessings Abound” had been on my mind constantly for the last month. It was the first Taiwanese song I learned in church and the opening song for my dad’s funeral video. A month ago, an intercessor friend of mine dreamed of my grandma and my mom with this song as the background music. The song opens with the sentence “the egrets in the farm do not lack anything”. My friend gave me this verse: “The LORD, the God of your fathers, make you a thousand times so many more as ye are, and bless you, as he hath promised you! Deuteronomy 1:11” Two days later a couple living in Brisbane posted the egrets in a lake near their home on social media.

When I got back to Taiwan, I rode in a car where the owner was playing this song. During our maternal family trip to Jiaoxi, there were egrets in the tourist attraction we visited called Longtan Lake, the accommodation we stayed in had a large picture of egrets in the toilet, and there were many egrets in the farms surrounding the accommodation. We celebrated my grandma’s birthday in Jiaoxi.

We then went to the Wuling Farm where we saw beautiful flowers, and went on a trail to the waterfall where we saw a beautiful rainbow at the bottom of the waterfall!

Taipei:

During this trip, I received a lot of help from Dr Eileen Lin, the principal of the Methodist Graduate School of Theology in Taiwan: learned more about her ministry, “Soul Home”, got my retainer adjusted, visited her church and listened to a very good Sunday sermon and coincidentally bumped into a friend whom I knew in Australia, had lunch with Dr Lin’s family, etc.

During New Year’s Eve, Sunny invited the 2015 Israel Marching Prayer Group G to her home for the New Year fireworks! We experienced great fellowship and worship! The group leader Andy shared with us how he felt a deep burden to “be aligned with God” and to “link”. Last year, when he went to serve in Vietnam, he felt “the heartbeat of Jesus”: the love of Jesus for humanity that made him cry very painfully. Ever since his return from the trip to Israel, God started linking him up with people whom he would not have been able link up with under his original circumstances. Sunny shared with us some of her recent studies in “the life of Jesus”, and “healing and deliverance counselling”, which was interesting. At the end of the crossover, caught a taxi home without excessive delays. On 1Jan, whilst reading a book Dr Lin gave me on the plane, a rainbow shone through the window onto the page I was reading (which is quite memorable because this never happened to me when I was reading on the plane before).

During this trip, I sensed that my mom had put a lot of effort in trying to link up the family. As the firstborn of the Lin family, she recruited my maternal family for short trips and meal gatherings. As the widow of the firstborn of the Wang family, she recruited my paternal family for meal gatherings. On the last day of my trip to Taiwan she became very sick but still accompanied me to church. Need to pray her more frequently.

I came to this realization: If I want to develop the spiritual eyes of Martin Luther King Jr and dream with God, I still need to work on the basics of the spiritual disciplines, so I can be better aligned with God, be better spiritually formed, so I can look at family and friends with the mercy of Christ and be able to impact on them more positively.