🥸 TREE 620: Jeff Gill was a smuggler

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In 1997, just before Britain gave Hong Kong back to China, Christine and I took trip there with some friends. We spent 10 days helping Christian ministries get ready for China’s return to power. They weren’t sure how China was going treat them. They didn’t know what China would do with their warehouses full of bibles, so they decided the best idea was to empty their warehouses into mainland China before the authorities got a chance to go snooping.

I got to be a smuggler. I wore a suit and tried to look like a businessman on my way to conduct important business in the People’s Republic. Only my cases were stuffed with bibles, I didn’t know a word of Chinese and I was completely relying on my handler. On each of my three smuggling runs I went through a different port. The first time, I got caught. The rest of the group got through, so I had to buy my own boat ticket back to Hong Kong. The other two times I made it. On the third trip I spent a couple hours waiting for my handler with a not-suspicious look on my face in a cafe in Macau that I’m pretty sure was a spy hang out.

While we were in Hong Kong, we ate and loved our first Thai food. I shouted at a taxi driver and jumped out of his cab in the middle of the road (after paying). I ate chicken feet. We went to two Hard Rock Cafes in one night. I got a great deal on some genuine Calvin Klein jeans in an outdoor market. We didn’t buy Nike Airo trainers. We saw beautiful cows and hundreds of turtles. We were deafened by cicadas. I designed a yearbook for a school for missionary kids. Christine shredded hundreds of documents by hand.

For your smooth summer pleasure

When I was a kid I repeatedly read the comic book version of God’s Smuggler. When was a teenager, I read the actual book. Getting a chance to smuggle bibles behind the ‘bamboo curtain’ in my early 20s felt pretty cool.

Grow slowly
Jeff