Spiritual Lessons: That Changed My Life

By Nick Nichols

Stories Inside...

Faith and My Fear of a Foreign Language

One PROUD Groundhog | And the Fragility of Life

A. W. Tozer and Two Holes

Is God's Grace Sufficient?

The Thing Behind the Curtain

Faith, Feelings, and Granny's Finger

In My Darkest Hour—Elisabeth Elliot Spoke

My Anchor Holds

Faith and My Fear of Math

 

Bonus Stories...

Sold Our Home on the R-A-D-I-O

Not by Sight

3 Angels 3 Encounters 3 Blessings

God Spoke, and I Looked in the Bushes!

Bankrupt . . . but Blessed!

Professor Polly the Parrot

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Nichols
• Release date: Feb 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201027827

Nick Nichols

Nick Nichols was born on June 30, 1961, in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Educated at Wayne County High School and Georgia State University, he graduated in 1988, with a law degree. After clerking for a trial judge from 1988 until 1990, he started a trial practice that continues. He lives in Johns Creek, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Emma, and his stepdaughter, Madeleine.

Book preview

Faith and My Fear of a Foreign Language

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In my life I've had two GREAT fears—one was math, and the other was learning to speak a foreign language.  As for language, I even had a problem with learning my own language, English!  In middle school I’d have to get up in front of the class and on the blackboard diagram all the parts of a sentence.  I would have rather faced off a pack of wild, rabid, snarling and snapping wolves than to diagram a sentence in front of the class!  I felt like all those comma splices and dangling whatevers were gonna kill me!

To make matters worse, my English teacher in middle school was also the Spanish teacher.  The first year in English class when she would get upset with me, she would yell at me in Spanish and make me stay after school in her Spanish classroom.  The next year when I had to take Spanish and she would get upset with me, she would yell at me in English and make me stay after school in her English classroom.  As a result, I developed this fear/hate relationship with language—including my own.

So years later it was with fear and trembling that I stood up from my knees after praying while at the Bible college I was attending in Canada, with the thought that the Lord wanted me to go to my state college, the Ohio State University (OSU), back in the United States and study Chinese!!  I knew little to nothing about China.  I wasn’t even sure where it was located.  That was because I was not a good student in high school where I should have learned this in geography class.

The next day I was in the lobby of the administration building and remembered the large map of the world they had framed on the wall.  Walking over to it, I thought I would see exactly where China was located.  I stood in front of the map looking at the line boundary marking out the location of the country.  In an instant, the whole country suddenly turned into Chinese faces; I was seeing the Chinese from the waist up all crowded within the borders of China.  They were crying, wringing their hands, looking confused, and not knowing what to believe; they looked hopeless and full of despair.  The image was so sudden and so intense I stepped back and then looked to see if anyone else saw what I was seeing.  Nobody was staring at the map, and the emotion was too intense for me, so I had to walk away and then began wondering if I was going nuts seeing stuff!

That happened near the end of the spring semester; shortly after that, my wife and I left Canada to return to my home state.  Not long after, I stopped by to see my mom to tell her I would be taking Mandarin Chinese that fall quarter at OSU.  She started crying!  She told me that the day I was born while still in the hospital, she felt the Lord impress upon her that I would be a missionary to China and that my middle name David was not from my father’s middle name of David.  Instead, my middle name was from David Olsen, a missionary that had been martyred in China in the 1940s.  I was speechless, and she sat there crying happy tears.

In the fall quarter, my first day of Chinese class was okay, and I was given the Chinese name Ni Wei Li.  I also discovered, unlike all other languages, Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet!  You basically must learn one Chinese character for each word.  Thankfully, I survived the first day.  The next few days things were warming up as we started learning Chinese sounds and words.  My fear/hate language thing was on the rise inside me.  I was only there because I felt the Lord wanted me there.  The next week terror was settling in because this was when we were to start answering her questions in Chinese in front of everyone!  There were thirty students in my class, and I sat near the front on the far-right side—far from where she started the questioning.  She methodically worked her way from student to student, row by row.  She came to my row, and I broke out in a sweat.

Working her way down my row, she reached the person behind me—I was next.  Fear, fright, and flight all kicked in at once, and I jumped up out of my seat and ran to the back of the room to exit.  Ni Wei Li, where are you going? called my professor.  I looked at her, stuck my finger to my open mouth pointing at a tooth and told her I had a dentist appointment I’d forgotten!  I lied.  Walking down the hall away from the classroom, I said, Lord that was terrible; I’m never going back!!!  And for two weeks I was in turmoil not wanting to go back but struggling with the feeling that the Lord wanted me there.  I went back on a Friday.  The professor had already figured out what had happened.  During the beginning of the class, the professor comes over and stands beside me with her hand on my shoulder. 

Class, class, I want your attention!  All the students stopped writing and looked up at the two of us.  Ni Wei Li here is afraid of what all of you think about his Chinese, so everyone, please be patient with Ni Wei Li.  I was humiliated and felt stupid!  It was hard enough to come back to a college class after missing two weeks and then she did THAT to me!  In my heart I prayed, Lord, that does it!  I’m not coming back for sure!!!!! No way, NEVER!!!  The whole weekend I was in turmoil and again struggled with myself and the feeling that the Lord wanted me there taking Chinese.  I gave in; I was back in class on Monday and for the next few weeks, I had to work my rear off trying to catch up with the rest of the class.

As nothing short of a miracle from the Lord, I got through four quarters of Chinese.  I started debating if I should take a fifth quarter because I began feeling like I would never make it to China as a missionary.  Becoming a bit depressed over this, one day I found myself in a Christian bookstore.  As I was browsing the book racks, I saw a book about a pioneer missionary to China named Jonathan Goforth.  The book was titled, Goforth of China, so I purchased the book and read the story.  I had read a lot about China since I started my Chinese studies, and as far as missionaries went, Hudson Taylor who started the China Inland Mission had been my missionary hero to China.  But there were also things about Goforth’s life I could relate to, and he became my new missionary hero with Hudson Taylor close behind.  Both Goforth and Taylor were contemporaries working in different areas in China back during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I was inspired by Goforth’s life but was still struggling about taking more Chinese.  Around that time, my wife and I were invited to a wedding for one of her friend’s that was going to be held a few hours from where we lived.  On our arrival, we were told we would be staying overnight with some friends of theirs that were retired missionaries that had served some thirty years in Viet Nam.  The couple welcomed us and gave us an upstairs room for the night.  The wedding would be the next day.

I was sitting on the side of the bed getting ready for bed and got to staring at an old tintype photo on the