Have you seen the recent popular Chinese animation movie NeZha? Well, if you see NeZha in the movie, you have seen Stephen, one of my students. (He actually even looks somewhat like NeZha, dark-skinned and naughty and always getting into trouble.)
Stephen has always been the black sheep. He is smart and has his own mind. He came from a Christian family and was a black sheep within his family. His elder brother was a church pastor and was well respected, while Stephen was keeping his distance from church ministry. Finally, the Great Shepherd caught him and sent him to our seminary. He was also a black sheep at the seminary. Unlike his classmates, he preferred the internet more than books and openly admitted it. Some seminary teachers did not like him, for he looked “guilty” all the time. Even when he did not look for trouble, trouble seemed to find him just as well. Even when he did nothing wrong, he was suspected to have done something wrong. He simply did not fit.
Since Stephen’s elder brother who was also my student asked me to look after his kid brother, I kept an eye on him. We played table tennis frequently. That was the way we had conversation and discussed from not-so-serious to serious matters in life.
But in 2017, when we started engaging in Bukang Liwayway, a Filipino urban poor ministry, I had not considered recruiting him, for nobody wanted a trouble-magnet when launching a new ministry. However, he got wind of the ministry launch and wanted to join. After some prayer, I included him. During our first visit to the urban poor squatter area, Stephen showed why he belonged. He became buddy-buddy with urban poor youth within half an hour. Without any training in Tagalog, he picked up enough to hold a conversation with a teenage boy. He seemed very comfortable mixing together with strangers, people who were very different. Stephen fit in nicely.
Was it because most of these urban poor boys might be considered black sheep by our society? Was Stephen naturally gifted missionary material? Was it the work of the Holy Spirit? Maybe all three? Stephen engaged fully in the urban poor ministry from then on, and in a surprising development, this ministry became a unique way for Stephen to learn discipline and commitment. It gave him the direction he needed to focus his attention and to study hard.
Stephen is pastoring a church now. He still looks like Nezha and is still seen as a black sheep by some. Perhaps our Great Shepherd is using a black sheep to reach out to many more black sheep. It may take some years and one day Stephen might become a missionary to the hard-to-reach. Who knows?
