An update from Taiwan!

The outside of our classroom during a break

Well I’ve been in Taiwan for a little under a month now, so I guess I’m a little overdue for a blog post. Things have been absolutely insanely busy here, but it’s also been absolutely amazing!!!

I’ll start off with the rest of my time back home in Canada first, and then I’ll get to how things are here.

The rest of my time in Canada was awesome! I had an opportunity to speak at the London Christian Academy for their chapel service because my friend Laura is a teacher there, which was a pretty cool experience. I’ve never been a guest speaker before, so that was cool, and I’ve never really spoken to kids before, which was a little bit nerve racking because I was speaking to a wide range of ages and I didn’t want any of them to be bored, but it went really well and I even got a good review from one of the kids from my church who told her friend at church that she enjoyed it. I also was able to speak at my church, Thames Valley Vineyard, which was a lot of fun. It was great to just share with my family and friends about what God’s been doing the last 6 months as well as talk about my travels and the fun times I’ve had. My church has actually posted my “sermon” online, so if any of you want to hear it, here is the link to it.

Other than that, I was just spending time with family and friends, which was awesome. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to see everybody that I wanted to, but I was able to connect with a lot of people and my barbeque was a great success with about 60 people or so showing up. It was great to see my family, especially my nieces and nephew. It’s definitely been hard being away from everybody, so coming home for a month was a great recharge for me. Thanks to everybody that took the time to see me, and sorry to the people that I missed while I was home, I’ll be home again at some point in the future (most likely March or maybe around Christmas), so we’ll have to try and meet up then.

Anyways, I guess I’ll talk a little about Taiwan, since that’s probably what a lot of you are interested in. 

Like I said, things here are absolutely insanely busy. This school is really intense and takes a ton of work, but it’s definitely worth it. We’ve already gone through Galatians, Titus, Ephesians and Mark, and we just started Luke yesterday. The first few weeks have been really busy because we had classes everyday morning and afternoon and Saturday for the first 2 weeks and classes every morning last week, but starting this week we just have class 3 days a week in the morning because we’re used to the method and getting more used to what we need to do. In our classes we basically go through the background information for the book and go through the book and they help us with some observation and interpretation of the book. Now that we’re going down to only 3 days a week, it’ll be interesting to see how much they help us and how much more we’ll have to figure out on our own, which is nice but a little scary at the same time. lol. 

I know that some of you are wondering about the method that we use for studying the bible, but because it’s a little long, I’ve decided the best way to do that is create a 2nd post listing a “brief” overview of the method we use. So either scroll down to see the post, or click here.

As for how it’s been living here, I love it. It’s been interesting living in a completely different culture, especially since not many people speak English where I live, but it’s definitely awesome. There are many different sights and smells than what you get back home (stinky tofu is the worst smelling thing you can think of), but for the most part, the people are all very friendly, and other than dodging the constant traffic of motos (scooters), it’s pretty easy to get around. I’m living in Dan Shui (the spelling can differ depending on who you talk to), which is north of Taipei right near the coast and I live basically right across from the MRT (subway) station. Because of how busy we are, I don’t really get away too far very often, but we did go to Taipei 101 on our first weekend here, and last Sabbath (we are required to take 1 day off per week, so usually Sunday) I went to a beach that was about a 20 minute bus ride from here with some friends. It’s definitely way different from when I was living at Crystal Springs in New Zealand, because instead of living on a big base and having our own space, we all live in various different apartments around the town and walk (about 5 minutes or so) through town to our classroom. I live with 7 other guys in a 3-bedroom apartment that is actually pretty spacious. We have a pretty large living room, 2 bathrooms (one is in one of the bedrooms) and a kitchen.

The main street to our classroom

We tend to eat out a lot because it costs about the same, or maybe even cheaper than cooking your own food (usually about 70-100 NT per meal, which is between $2-3), also it’s a lot more convenient when you’re super busy to just buy food. The food is delicious, but the only complaint that I have is that it’s always super oily. They use oil in everything, so I’ve been cooking some of my lunches and dinner when I can (good old pasta with lots of veggies and chicken). We have a couple grocery stores right near us, and there’s a fruit and vegetable market just around the corner. Overall, the food situation is pretty good, and I was able to find brown rice finally, so I should be able to get into eating a little healthier, just gotta figure out exactly how to make the rice since the directions are in Chinese. haha.

Well this is getting to be a super long post, so I’ll cut it off here. I’ll try to post more often so that it’s not as much of a novel for you all to read, and so you won’t all forget about me. lol.

I hope and pray that you are all doing well back home. Please be keeping me in your prayers that God will not only help me to get through all the work that I’m going to be doing over the next 8 months, but that He will be speaking through it as well. I know that this is going to be not only a big step in the equipping process that God’s sending me through, but that it’s also going to be a big step in my relationship with God and how that is reflected in my thoughts and my life. I should probably mention too that pretty much all of our visas have now come in!! So thank you Jesus for that!! I still will have to leave the country next month and go to Hong Kong for a day with a bunch of my classmates to get my new visa, but at least we finally have all that we need!! 

I love and miss you all. May God bless you and keep you in whatever you are doing.

The Method for SBS

Alright, for those of you that are interested, here is an overview of the method that we use for studying the books.

We start by first read the book out loud, which is actually pretty cool, even though some books are a little intense (Luke took 2:15 to read, I wonder how long some of the OT books are gonna take, lol) it’s a unique experience getting to read the bible out loud. If you ever have an hour and a half to spare, I recommend reading Mark out loud with a group of friends, sounds weird, but people regularly spend a couple hours watching a movie with friends, why not read a book of the bible instead? We do the out loud read because that would be the way that most of the original readers would have the bible due to illiteracy and the lack of availability.

After the out loud read, we then read it and colour code observations, like people, places, times, the Trinity, repeated words, commands, contrasts, figures of speech, etc. We have a list of 28 different kinds of observations to make, and it really is interesting reading the bible and not trying to interpret at all, but just observe. 

We then start to break in down a little bit, so we read it again to find paragraph titles for all of the paragraphs in the book (even the ones that are only a verse or two). Then using our colour code and paragraph titles we split the book into major divisions (2 or 3 different major sections), then we break the divisions down into smaller sections and then we break the sections down into segments containing anywhere from 1 to 10 paragraphs each depending on the book and how everything fits together. It usually will work out to about 1 segment per chapter for the books, but the segments won’t necessarily each be a chapter long; for Mark we had segments that were 1 or 2 paragraphs and then had some that were over 2 chapters. This makes up what we call our horizontal chart.

Usually after PTs and making the horizontal we do a BRI which stands for basic required information, where we find out who wrote the book (Mark actually is anonymous, but it is credited to him and it’s amazing the disputes over the authorship of Paul’s letters), who they wrote it to (every book has an audience, even the gospels), when and where it was written and then we list historical background information for the original reader (and in the case of narrative books, the original hearer as well). We do all this so that we can start to get an understanding of what things would mean to the people who lived in the culture and place at that time so that we can have a better understanding of what the author was actually saying and how they would have received what was written/said.

After all of that (which you should be done by the end of Monday – we start the next book immediately after we hand in the previous book which are usually due at 12:30), we finally start to fill in the insides of our vertical charts. We have 1 vertical chart for each segment that we have, and it lists the paragraph titles and has boxes that we can put more text from each paragraph into to give a better understanding of what is happening in the paragraph. Doing the insides of our chart takes us through our 4th reading of the book.

After we’ve done our insides we finally get into interpreting what it actually means! We read through the book for the 5th time, and while we are reading, we pull out observations of things that we’ve observed during our colour code and interpret what the author’s intent was and what it would mean to the original reader or hearer. We also will list historical background information or do word studies to give more information to back up our interpretation. After the majority of our interpretations we list a timeless truth that we can learn from the observed text. For every timeless truth we have a related application that can be a specific application that we carry out ourselves (for example one of mine was to make sure I pray before every class and before I do any work to keep my focus on God and not just on gaining knowledge), mindset application (changing the way we think about something) or a “seven spheres of influence (church, family, business, arts, media government education) application, (where we list how the timeless truth could be applied in a certain sphere and how that would influence that sphere).

After all of this we finally get to the final application where we prayerfully process all the work we’ve just done and share what God has been speaking to us through the book. We then have a major specific final application to apply all that we’ve learned.

So if it sounds like it’s a lot of work, it’s because it is, but it’s definitely worth it. It is an absolutely amazing privilege to be able to take the time to go through the bible this way, and I can’t wait to see all that God teaches me and changes in me through this time. Thank you for all of your prayers and support, because without you all, I wouldn’t be able to do this.