Franklin Graham.

Yesterday I went to the Hong Kong Franklin Graham Festival with my supervisor and my colleagues. I’m not a Christian, but since the event was free and I had a free afternoon + evening to spare, I thought I might want to take a look at how such huge religious events are like.

For a non-believer, I think the event was pretty massive. The Hong Kong Stadium was totally packed with people – I reckon there must be almost 40,000 people inside the stadium. The preaching session itself was interesting, though the immediate Chinese translation did make it a bit not as good because it feels as if the whole thing wasn’t coherent. It’s like, Franklin Graham would say one line, and then the Chinese interpreter would translate what he just said. I, of course, would rather be listening to Franklin Graham talk on his own without a Chinese interpreter, but I guess such interpreter is needed because we are in Hong Kong after all.

The message that I think Franklin Graham is trying to bring across is actually pretty simple. He didn’t use anything too complicated or difficult. Instead, he kept on repeating the same point, and it did make a very lasting impression on whoever that attended. I mean, after more than 24 hours, the story that he was talking about is still ringing in my ears!

Towards the end of the session, he invited people to step to the front of the stage to declare their new belief, and I think there must have been 10,000 people stepping up – it was actually quite a magnificent sight. As for me, I chose to remain in my seat at that point of time because I didn’t think I am ready for such a thing yet. Of course I’m not saying that I’ll never take a belief into the Christian religion – or any religion for that matter, but I just feel that I’m not mentally ready for the commitment of a religion. I know believers of religions will say that you are always ready to take your belief, but I just want to find out a bit more first.

Back to work tomorrow. Not fun.