Well…did you miss me?

You’d better have responded with a resounding, "Yes!" to that question rather than a somewhat confused, "What? Were you ever gone?"

It’s been three days since my last blog post.  I guess things got busy this week (in a good way…)

Did you ever have one of those days where it seemed as if the clouds lifted or rather shifted to make way for a ray of light piercing the gray skies like a knife? Or have you ever had a feeling of intense relief–liking finding your wallet or purse (beneath the cushions of the couch) after convincing yourself that it was surely lost.

I guess I have been enjoying this new wave of contentment lately (even if I am still getting a little splattered in the typical cross-cultural stressors.) In some ways this new sense of peace is somewhat mysterious (in that I can’t pinpoint it to any one single event) but in other ways it comes from many consecutive "good breaks" and breakthroughs. Here’s some of the highlights:

   
• After all the run-ins with Mafan over our first 3 months here, it feels like our home is finally coming together. We got some pictures on the walls, we bought a rug this week, the radiators are pouring out the heat, and we had some of our "broken" odds-and-ends around the house repaired today. Check out the pictures below. (The rug really made a difference. So comfy to walk on and pleasing to the eye, too. We bought it at a store that most of us foreigners call Pier One because of the types of things you can buy there.)

   

• Christmas is around the corner. It’s weird because it will be so different being here (away from family and friends) but in some ways I feel as if I am going to appreciate it more. It’s almost like I’m clinging to it as something I have ownership of. I want to watch Christmas shows every night in December. (I’ve already watched one or two…) I also feel as if the things the Lord has been revealing to me lately about his love for me (and for all of humanity) has drawn me into the Advent season a bit more than is typical for me. May I digress a bit…(you know I will)

  To think of that little Savior in the trough, spitting up on his swaddling clothes, making Joseph a little crazy with his crying ("Do you think he’s got collic, Mary?") drawing blue collar joes who smelled of sheep to the same pitstop where tarot card readers / star gazers would follow with gaudy, expensive gifts…how human, how real…sometimes I can’t understand a love that big that would come slummin’ after us. God, the father, well we couldn’t look at the train of His robe without burning up like a cinder. But, Jesus, the one who came as a babe, the human-God one-third and yet One, He is so human that He delights in taking us out for coffee and laughing at our jokes, at our foibles, at our own creature-ness. He is amazing when you think of Him, on Him, through Him. I wonder what His first human memories were of, don’t you? I wonder if the smell of the stable stuck with him and came back to Him at nostalgic moments later in life…

   

• Language learning has been fun. I can’t remember laughing as hard as I did today when my teacher was telling us about how certain girls she knew were feichang pang (extraordinarily fat!) There are certain things that the Chinese people are subtle about, but there are many others that they are quite blunt about (by our western standards.) A person’s weight seems to be fair game for comment it seems. We explained to our teacher that in many western countries you can never call someone "fat" even if they are.  It just isn’t polite; I told her that you have to call them "big-boned" in America.

  Speaking of body parts…earlier in the week we were discussing other Chinese terms in our spoken language class. One derogatory term that the Chinese have for Westerners is that they call us "da bieze" (big nose’s) because I guess by comparison our snouts are quite a bit larger than theirs. To further elaborate on this point, our teacher told us (in a non-derogatory way, I guess?) that my friend Bill "yo da bieze" (has a big nose) but "bijao" (relatively speaking) "Todd you zui da bieze" (Todd has the biggest nose!). Oh, how I miss the day when they used to call us those "foreign white devils".

   

• The Christmas store. We found a store in town that sells Christmas stuff. It wasn’t hard to find the store since the ex-pat grapevine is pretty impressive in spreading the word. We went there in search of a fake plastic Christmas tree (really our only option here.) The store wasn’t hard to find with the huge inflatable Santa Claus outside. It was a small building in an alley off of the main thoroughfare. When you open the sliding glass doors into the cramped store though, it’s a bit freaky. It felt a bit like a Santa Claus Cult! I am told that the Chinese really are into the Jolly Old Elf and now I believe it. The store was pretty small but the walls were covered in Santa posters, decorations, and other St. Nick merchandise and paraphenilia. We found our Charlie Brown tree inside and purchased it for a whopping 60 kuai. We opted against the fiber-optic tree and when for something a bit more subtle (subtle is hard to find in China we’re finding.) All joking aside, we were thankful to be able to get a few decorations and other reminiscent-of-home holiday knick-knacks. (Check out the pics below…the tree shaped up nicely since we brought our ornaments from the U.S. of A.)

   

• The Chinglish keeps me laughing. I saw a guy with the word "Etnic" on his jacket, a girl with the word Herb written in sparkly letters on her jacket, and a restaurant/coffee shop called , "Babilong". Let’s think about this…some ancient guys try to erect a building to scratch the heavens, God stops them and confuses their languages, thousands of years later their descendents try to learn their former co-workers language in order to name their coffee shop after the original building project… Duh, of course they’re going to misspell it. There is no other way a story like this could end.

   

• Anna is a bit language-confused. I overheard her trying to discipline Sarah today. She grabbed Sarah’s hand and said, "Nye! Nye, Sarah!" Nye is the Norwegian word for ‘no‘.  Kids pick up a lot when they are in a multi-national carpool in western China.

   

• A really good date with the Mrs. It’s amazing how far a $2 bottle of wine, a chocolate bar, some paper, some markers, a rock, and a lot of great memories can go when you’re sharing these things with the right person. (God) arranged-marriages, I recommend them.

I think that covers the past three days.  Just think if I’d waited a week…you’d still be reading this long post.