April 30, 2025: A Marvelous Month in Taiwan

We used to live down the street behind the trees in the center of the picture.

“Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!” (Psalm 118:1).

Dear Praying Friends:

Since leaving Charlottesville a month ago, I have experienced God’s steadfast love in many ways. The trip is not yet over, but enough has happened for me to report that your prayers have been answered, far more richly and powerfully than I had imagined.

Every day, the Lord has manifested his love to me through his people and through non-Christians who have been kind to me, like the hotel staff who brought coffee and hot soy milk to my table when I told them that my hand tremor would otherwise cause me to spill the contents all over the place.

As I have said each Monday, he has given me deeply meaningful conversations with friends old and new. I’ve had very encouraging fellowship with former Greek students, church members, seminary colleagues, and some who participated in our Chinese fellowships in Charlottesville years ago. They have showered me with affection, expressed in words, gifts, practical help, and generosity. I don’t remember a comparable period of time when such lavish love has made me even more aware of God’s steadfast love towards us.

A third group of former Greek students organized a get together in which I learned of God’s steady love to them over several decades, enabling them to remain faithful in a single church or to start a new and wide-reaching online discipleship program that is reaching several thousand Chinese around the world. Most have gone to China to plant new churches or strengthen existing ones. Several have published books, including one on how to do discipleship training in a church and an evangelistic booklet that has gone through six printings.

At the same time, the Lord has allowed me to reflect his love to others, mostly by listening but also by offering reminders of God’s promises in his Word.

Young adults have sought counsel about major life and career decisions. One of my publishers told me of the formidable challenges he faces. Couples in whose weddings I participated opened up about serious problems in their marriages.

I wrote this on Monday morning, the 28th, in Kingsburg, California, where Dori’s sister, Jean, and her family live. They, too, have extended a warm welcome to us, offering both a family reunion and, for me, rest after a demanding month of ministry and then the long trip back to the United States. God willing, I will leave for Houston today, Wednesday the 30th, arriving late enough so that I’ll be staying overnight before taking the shuttle to College Station.

“You are my God, and I will give thanks to you; you are my God, and I will extol you. Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever!” (Psalm 118:28-29).

Yours in his unfailing love,
Wright

We arrived Thursday night, March 27th, after a long but smooth flight and were taken to the Grand Hotel by the daughter of a couple who had been in the young adults fellowship in our church in the 1980s. She and Sarah were playmates long ago.

Lan Ya Church in a suburb of Taipei - friends from our time with the International Christian Fellowship (ICF) in Charlottesville, VA, Jason and Joy, gained an invitation for me to speak here on Sunday, March 30th. Click on this link for a short video clip of my preaching.

Jason and Joy (Jason is pictured here) had taken Edward and me touring around the place where I lived with my family in 1957, and to the National Palace Museum on Friday and Saturday, March 28th and 29th.

We were able to visit many familiar places. Dori and I used to live down the street behind the trees in the center of the picture.

The house we lived in has become a coffee shop.

Meeting with former students on Zoom - for almost an hour, we enjoyed hearing uplifting stories of God’s work in their lives. Later, several of them made appointments to see me.

Saying goodbye to former students at the seminary after sharing with seminary faculty and staff a testimony of God’s grace to me in the past dozen years since my last visit.

Monday morning, April 14th, in Taipei, with Taipei 101 towering in the background.

Another group of former Greek students.

My abridgment of the Chinese edition of God, Revelation and Authority in the bookstore of the seminary.

In this picture, from the center to the right, you see the area where we worshiped, lived, shopped, and worked. That is, where a former church was, and where the seminary was, and where our homes were. (The tall building in the foreground was not yet built.) Almost all the people whom I have seen in the past few weeks were first encountered in this neighborhood.

Both she and her husband have published books.

James and Ruth Park, with Ruth's mother, on Easter Sunday.

A warm welcome from Dori's sister, Jean, and her husband, Tom, in California.