It’s a truth that will always amaze me: people can be so vastly different and yet so fundamentally the same.

I’m spending several days with a Chinese friend and her family in another city over the lunar New Year.  Right now, I’m tired and so very full of food and thinking about returning home on the train tomorrow.  My mind is a bit overwhelmed, and I’m having a hard time processing the sights and sounds and tastes and emotions of the last few days into intelligble words.

However, I keep being struck by memories.  Memories of the occasional holidays that we spent at my grandparents with our other relatives on my mother’s side of the family.  Smelling cigarette smoke and hearing loud talking and eating vast quantities of food.  Playing games with your cousins and watching tv your grandpa.  Those things are all the same here.  Sure, the language is different and the food is different, but older ladies are still spending long conversations discussing why I’m not married yet.

I’m so thankful that I’ve been included in this family event on the other side of the world from where I grew up.  And I keep wishing my grandparents, who were adventurers at heart, could be here to see me… and to taste the food!

Here are some winter photos of my school.  A few are from a month ago, but most of these are from today.  Our campus is quiet and snowy during the winter break.  Some friends and I took advantage of this to go sledding today.  Then we headed to a barbecue restaurant to get very full.

It’s a topic I’ve pondered a lot in my life: singleness vs. marriage.  I’ve been single, well, awhile.  I have lots of single friends to talk about this with.  I’ve had lots of friends who have journeyed through being single into being married.

Being such a large life issue, it’s something that tends to be revisited often, re-worked, re-thought as new life situations happen in and around me and those that I know.  I’ve listened to sermons, taken advice, read books, and pr-ed a lot about it.  Probably it would be the same were I married: it’s a part of life that needs constant evaluation to be brought into the light of truth.  Relational areas are places where we need great grace and serious sanctification.  They are areas where we can bring much glory to G as He is seen working in us.

That being said, I believe I see growth in my life in my handling of this area.  At least, a light bulb has gradually been starting to glow that now seems to shed a lot more light than I used to have.  I want to let you in on some thoughts that I’ve had recently.  Be aware: 1) I’m a work in progress, and 2)this is long. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes someone recommends something to you, a sermon or a book or a blog or a movie, and you put off reading or watching or listening to it.  Then later, when you finally get around to whatever it was, you find that the timing, even through seemingly random delay, was perfect.   Read the rest of this entry »

The second week of vacation was vastly different than the first week.  Mostly because, instead of going out adventuring every day and meeting students, I spent every day, save one, home sick with Angel Cat.  It was not a serious sickness, merely an annoying sickness, to use a friend’s helpful classification.  Between the headaches, body aches, dizziness and extreme tiredness, I watched Lost.  I finished five seasons of the show in a little over 2 weeks, just in time for the premiere of season 6.  But now I am a little sick of them all– the Lost characters, I mean.

Thankfully, I recovered enough to spend yesterday with some dear friends.  It was a day of  challenging conversations,  good food, shared laughter, and faster internet.  I returned home way too late last night but very thankful for His grace being displayed to me through the patience and kindness and love and growth of others.  Then I stayed up WAY too late thinking and suffering from a caffeine overdose.  For the first time in such a long time, I didn’t fall asleep until 4 a.m.    This  caused a bit of a flu (or whatever) relapse today, coupled with the fact that my cat still thinks I need to be up early no matter when I went to bed.  So, I sit here, blogging like a goofball at 9 p.m.  in my pajamas with a headache.

I’m really blessed.