A Typical Day

So it just hit me that most of you don't know what a typical day looks like for me while I'm here in Hong Kong. Here's my best attempt to describe it:

A typical day for me ideally involves me waking up at 6:30 so I can pray and read my Bible. Of course, as the week goes on, I get more and more exhausted, and this time generally moves back a few minutes each day until the start of the next week, when it goes back to 6:30. Around 7:30, I start to get ready for work, and I leave for work around 8. On my way to the tram stop, I stop at the bakery for breakfast. I then take the tram (basically a double-decker cable car) to the bus stop and take a bus from there to work. I arrive at the office at about 8:30. Work starts at 9, so the half hour is usually very quiet in the office. (I don't leave early to be an overachiever. After my roommate had been here a few weeks, I realized I hardly saw him, largely because he was leaving for work at 8 and I was waking up after he left for work. To try to have more time to hang out with him, I decided to leave for work earlier so we can ride together until I get off the tram.) If it looks like a busy day, I will sometimes use the time I'm in the office before work starts to get a head start on my work. Otherwise, this is time for checking email, sports scores, facebook, news updates, or catching up on Bible reading I should have done earlier in the morning but slept through.

Once work starts, I have a number of things I'm responsible for each week. I generally have to prepare a lesson for either the youth group (Shillage) or for Sunday School (Soul Cafe). Nathan prepares the lesson for whichever one I'm not teaching, which means starting November 26, I will have to prepare an extra lesson each week (because Nathan's leaving). I also have to prepare for discipleship group meetings (I have 3 a week). Some weeks, I go do stuff at a Christian School in the area so I can get more interaction with the kids outside of a church environment. I am also responsible for planning events and taking care of whatever else arises throughout the week. Often, I will meet with people for lunch, whether that is students who are free, Nathan to discuss work and life, other youth workers from around Hong Kong, or friends. Work ends at 6 each day.

Each day has its own individual nuances that set it apart from every other day of the week. For example, Monday is my day off. On Mondays, I make an intentional effort to do nothing at all related to work or school. It is a day of rest which involves sleeping in, spending some good time with God, no schedule, and often hanging out with friends. Tuesday nights I have a discipleship group I run that meets at 7, and the games for my Ultimate Frisbee league are at 9. Wednesday mornings I have a discipleship group I run that meets at 8, and Wednesday evenings, the youth band practices for Friday night at 6. I'm supposed to be supervising this, but lately I've actually been leading music for them because the student who typically leads has had to work on Friday nights. Thursday nights, I do English tutoring every other week. And of course, Friday night is youth group.

Every day is busy and exciting, each bringing its own challenges and joys.

Trailwalker Update 2

When I woke up this morning, my entire body hurt. I rolled over and looked at my alarm, and it really was time to get up, just 6 hours after going to bed. I begrudgingly rolled over, swung my feet over the side of the bed and got up.

I know what you’re thinking. Why were you so sore? Isn’t 6 hours more than enough sleep for someone your age? What’s so special about this? The answer: yesterday was my longest day of training yet for the Trailwalker (which is a fundraiser for Oxfam). Starting around 11 AM, I hiked about 45 km (slightly longer than a marathon) over the next 13 hours. We did almost the entire second half of the trail which we will be hiking for the Trailwalker. Because the rest of my Trailwalker group is out of Hong Kong for the weekend, I went with a couple other guys from my church. We went slightly slower than my normal training pace, but it was a good day for building endurance and learning certain preparation tips which I would never have realized I needed to know on the shorter training hikes we’ve done so far. After the hike, it took a couple hours to get home (a long bus ride, a short walk, and a stop at McDonalds), and after a long shower, I went to bed around 2:30. While 6 hours of sleep is normally enough for me, it falls desperately short of being adequate when my body is trying to recover from a 45 km hike. Tomorrow (my day off) will be a beautiful day.

In the rest of my life, things are going well. Last week, I read the book Radical by David Platt. It is a book I highly recommend about taking Jesus words as Jesus’ words and obeying them because He said them rather than trying to analyze the reasons why they shouldn’t apply to us. It hurt at points (notice the “s” on the end of the word “point”) because of how close to home a lot of what he was saying hit, but it was an incredible read and a great challenge to take my faith seriously.

Trailwalker/Update

I am sorry it has taken so long for me to update my blog since my last post. I have had a crazy busy couple of weeks, consisting of 3 consecutive days of camp with a local Christian school (where I spoke twice to the eleventh grade boys and hung out with the kids for the whole time I was there), work, teaching at our youth group for the past few weeks, leading two discipleship groups per week, hanging out with the kids, and "networking" with other Hong Kong youth pastors (this largely consisted of us staying up until 4:30 AM at camp playing cards and talking about life, in addition to some basketball in the park and another night discussion at camp which ended at the nice early hour of 1 AM). My ultimate frisbee league has also started, and my team, the Leadbeaters (an Australian possum which was thought to be extinct for many years until one was discovered in the 1960s or so) is 0-1-1. We have become a comeback team, letting our opponents go ahead early and making it exciting late, but so far we haven't had big enough comebacks to turn them into wins.

Another big development in my life the past couple of weeks is that I have been recruited to do something called the "Trailwalker" with some men from my church. The Trailwalker is a charity fundraising hike along a Hong Kong trail called the MacLahose Trail. The MacLehose is 100 km long. All 4 members of the team must do all 100 km (62 or so miles) together. Each team has 48 hours to complete the hike, but my team has set a goal of completing it in 24 hours. We went out last Saturday, which was my first day training with the team, for a hike of about 20 km (12.5 ish miles). This past Thursday night we went on a night hike, where it rained a lot (the rain wasn't part of the plan, but we walked through it anyway), to get used to hiking in the dark, since completing the MacLehose in 24 hours will require us to walk through the night. Yesterday (Saturday), we went on another hike, this one being 27 km (about 16 miles). We did yesterday's hike (on 2 days' rest) in 6.7 hours, which would put us on a 100 km pace of just under 25 hours. We still have a month and a half until the Trailwalker, but we have a lot of training to do in that time.