Update for the First Week of February
My fear in posting this update is that people will assume that this post will contain information about how to deal with misbehaving children at the grocery store. I’m sorry, this post will be of no help at all regarding that situation.
The problem that I am thinking about while I write this post is that I want to write something interesting, but I just spent a week sitting in meetings, which although good, were not very exciting. I actually prefer the non-exciting type of meeting, but that doesn’t help me write interesting updates.
On Saturday, Heidi and I went to the grocery store and found that it was full of dragons. Unfortunately, I had not brought my sword, shield, or recycle friendly shopping bag and could do nothing about it except study culture. And so, I will share with you what I learned about dragons.
First of all, dragons apparently only come out of their lairs on Chinese New Year. This makes them easy to avoid if you don’t want to meet one in the dairy section. Second, they are very, very, noisy or at least are accompanied the clashing of large cymbals to the fast beat of a very big drum. This also makes them easy to avoid.
For those of you hoping for parenting advice, I will mention that in the vicinity of the dragon, at least within the area of a city block, you will not be able to hear the whining or crying of children who are fed up with shopping. You also won’t be able to hear yourself think, but that is beside the point.
The last thing is, that although you might fear losing your hearing you do not need to fear losing your life. These dragons to not eat people or whining children. Apparently, they only feed on money in red envelopes that dangle from the ceiling over the various businesses in the mall. I asked a guard how much money was in the envelope, but he didn’t know and I can’t jump that high, so there ends my culture study.
Monday morning, we packed up early and headed for the airport, anxious to get back up north, one step closer to home. We made it to the airport, checked in, and waited with a huge crowd of people until we were told that our flight was canceled due to bad weather. We will try again tomorrow.
Praise: Our delay meant that we could cross paths with some longtime friends that we would have missed.
Please pray that we will be able to travel in God’s perfect time and that we can make it back into to the village without delay.
Please pray that Heidi’s Bible story book project would move forward. She is waiting for the final approval via email so she can send it to the printer.
God bless,
Jonathan & Heidi