Looking Back – 2011
Well, it’s already the middle of January, but it’s not too late to look back at some of the highlights of 2011 – most of which went unblogged!
2011 saw two trips from family to visit me here in Bangkok. My dad came through on his “world tour” in April, and my whole family came for the first two weeks of July. This time together was so special! Thankfully, my apartment is large enough that we were able to find room for us all to stay here together for the two weeks. We squeezed a lot of fun into those two weeks, and didn’t even need to leave Bangkok! Cooking class, museums, good food, grocery shopping, … It was really special to be able to share things that are a part of my normal life now with my family!
2011 also saw me travelling a bit, too! In June, I went on the PAOC SEA retreat to Phuket, Thailand, and had a really wonderful time connecting with missionaries from all over the region. I loved hearing their stories, and just really enjoyed being with Canadians for awhile!
After my family left in July, I went to Malawi to visit my great friends, the Buzikievich family. Connie and Dave run the Village of Hope Malawi, and I really enjoyed seeing the facility and helping out a bit. It really was just so fun to spend time with everyone after so long…
Last of all, I managed to travel home to Canada for the Christmas holidays – and only my sister and friend knew I was coming! It was the perfect surprise! I still can’t believe how perfectly the entire trip went. I even got to go to Florida to spend time with my grandparents, and my uncle and his family! It was such a special trip!
2011 also saw me “almost home” for Thanksgiving with my family, thanks to Skype. My aunt and her family were visiting for the holiday, and I was able to Skype in several times for a couple of hours of “being home.” After Thanksgiving dinner, they set up the laptop in the living room and sitting here in Bangkok, it really was almost like being there – listening to the conversations flow, watching people interact, … It was a very special holiday!
2011 was filled with many other great memories and learning opportunities – too many to list here! I can’t believe how much has changed in my life over the last couple of years… It makes me excited to see what 2012 has in store!
July in Review
So, here’s a little overview of my summer, which was packed full of wonderful things!
After teaching summer school for three weeks, I went to Phuket for a few days for the PAOC South East Asia regional retreat. It was absolutely wonderful! I got to catch up with people I’ve met before from all over the region, and I got to meet many (many, many) new people, too! It was really inspiring to hear everyone’s stories and what they are doing now. I enjoyed the speaking and worshipping in English with fellow PAOC people. I also enjoyed that the retreat had a lot of time built in for just socializing and talking with each other. I left feeling really refreshed, and with a better picture of what all the people in the region are working on. :)
A day or two after I got back, my family arrived for a two week visit. It was absolutely wonderful!!! I can’t believe all the things we did in such a short period of time! We had time for chatting, playing games, touring cultural places, going to cooking school, and a bunch of other things. It was just really such a special time for me to spend with them… I kept looking around everywhere we went and thinking, “I can’t believe they’re really here!!!!”
Here are some pictures from our time together:
Picking up my family at the airport!
Showing them around my school.
Mom at the wax museum.
Yummy Thai food!
How they put the hair tinsel in.
Freshly tinselled!
This is the image I see in my head every time I look at my kitchen now... :)
Cooking up a storm at cooking school!
At the Grand Palace
After they left, I had about two days to wait before leaving for Malawi to visit the Buzikievich family – lifelong friends. But… I’ll have to leave Malawi for another post!
Have a wonderful day!
Back Into the Swing of Things
Well, after a busy summer full of great adventures, it’s finally time to get back into the swing of things – routines, work, Thai class, and all that jazz. I’m really looking forward to it!
This week was orientation and classroom prep. It was SO wonderful to see everyone again! There is also a great group of new teachers this year, so it is shaping up to be quite a year! I have 18 students in my class right now, the same as last year. I’ll take pictures of my room on Monday before open house and share them here!
One of the things I was mulling over this summer had to do with discipline and being intentional. I’ve got a few different “therefore…s” I’ll be working on this year, and one of them is to blog regularly again. It’s something I never intended to stop doing, but it just got lost in the hubbub and put off in the fatigue of last year. I am committing, this year, though, to writing at least once a week. Why? Simply because it is important to me.
I’m going to start off by reviewing my summer adventures! Expect lots of photos and updates as I work my way through the best July I’ve ever had!!!
Musings on Love
I think in order to have your heart broken, you need to first love, right? You can’t be devastated by lack of love or broken trust if you did not love deeply first.
Therefore, on the surface level, if we were really thinking along self-preservation lines, we would avoid loving deeply in order to avoid the inevitable heartache.
And yet… we still yearn to love deeply. It’s like that desire is buried deep within who we are – it seems on some level that everyone longs for significant love…
So… that begs the question, when we love someone deeply, do we love them for their sake, or ours? What, if anything, has the power to change the degree to which we actually love? Why?
If you have a child, do you love that child because something within you needs to love? Or do you love the child because you know that child deserves and needs to be loved? Or do you love that child because you need them to love you back? If a child doesn’t love you back, does that affect the way you love them on a fundamental level, or just the way it’s expressed?
If you live your whole life believing someone loves you, what is it that makes you so quickly forget that when it looks like they are trying to hurt or inconvenience you? What changes in a person that gives them the ability to deeply hurt people they once loved? Or, do they love the same but suppress it purposefully in order to cause pain? Can you intentionally cause pain to someone and still love them? Can you maliciously cause pain to someone and still love them?
If your heart is broken, are you foolish or noble for continuing to love? At what point might that change? If we stop loving, is it for our sake, or for theirs? If we keep loving, is it for our sake, or for theirs? To what degree are we responsible for continuing to love those who consistently cause us pain but are in ‘positions’ where love is expected (parents, children, …)? Does choosing to pull back mean we are harming a relationship if they’ve already pulled back themselves? Can choosing to continue to love harm a relationship more?
Is it harder to stop loving, or to begin loving again?
If you continue to hope for restored relationship, is it easier to continue loving, or to start again once things start looking up? Which is better for you in the long run? Which is better for them?
Does pulling back cause bitterness to fester in our hearts? Or, does continuing to love do so?
If we love because we need to love, does it matter how the other person feels or responds? Why?
If we love because we want the other person to feel loved, do we only show love in ways they appreciate?
If we love because we need to be loved back, do we continue to love when we get nothing back?
There are, no doubt, countless times love makes our lives more difficult, and there are times love makes their lives more difficult. Knowing how to love best is probably one of the most challenging recurring issues we face in life… How to show love without spoiling. How to show trust without being naive. How to show confidence without downplaying wise council.
It isn’t easy to love. Society makes it seem that way. I think it’s easy enough to show love; we all know what it looks like to love someone. And it’s easy enough to call affection, care and enjoying someone’s company ‘love’. But to really love someone… that is much more complex and challenging thing. It requires thought and energy, constant attention, and something deeper than we realize to keep it going.
If love were surface level, I really don’t think we’d bother. It’s too hard, and it has the potential to hurt too much.
I wonder if our desire to love is evidence of the fact that we were made in the image of God. If God placed eternity in our hearts and gave us the drive to search for ‘more,’ did he also place this desire to love and be loved in our hearts, too?
The more I think about it, the more I realize that this makes a lot of sense. We say a lot that God’s love is so great we cannot even fathom it, but I think God designed us with this love deep inside us to give us a glimmer of understanding of how he loves – to help us understand him better despite the fact we cannot fully get our heads around the fullness of his love.
I have seen parents filled with love for their children have to make some very difficult decisions about how to continue loving their children best. Sometimes that’s been holding them close, and sometimes that’s been letting them go. While the outward actions of these people loving look different, the love within is constant.
I have seen people both intentionally and inadvertently hurt, and continue to love regardless, though again, the way that love looks varies from situation to situation.
In our humanness, we are constantly faced with the challenge of regulating our sinful nature and deciding how best to respond to those who hurt us in ways that coincide with the underlying love. Sometimes the result may not look like love to everyone looking on, but we know within ourselves that it is.
In God’s sovereign perfectness, he does not have to struggle against a sinful nature to know how best to love us. He loves with perfect love and acts in ways that always fall in line with that. He knows what we need most even if we don’t (or don’t agree, or don’t want it).
When we love, even in the most pure way, we are loving with a tiny, imperfect and humanized version of True love, of God’s love. It also follows, then, that if God is capable of deeper love, he is also capable of deeper heartache than we can conceive. And yet, he continues to love because it is an essential element of his character.
Just like the teenager who thinks his parents don’t love him because he can’t have his own way, I think when we are tempted to look at God and say, ‘how can this be if you really love?’, we need to remember that we are only operating with a tiny understanding of what love really is.
God is infinitely just, and in order to show love, he must also show justice. Mercy, grace, forgiveness, redemption, … So many elements to God’s love that we have only an inkling of – we see only the shadow of these things on earth, and do not have imaginations big enough to fathom these things in their fullest reality as God lives them. And yet, just because we don’t fully understand them doesn’t mean they don’t exist in a fuller state. And because we don’t understand them, we can’t presume to judge God based upon our glimpses of shadows of values he created.
Realizing how awesome and complicated real love is in a human context leaves me in awe of God. While I sit here on earth struggling to figure out the answers to the above questions, God sits in heaven with all of the answers already, loving each and every person perfectly, showing it to each person in the perfect way, even if it doesn’t seem like it, or if they are choosing to ignore it, with his heart breaking in the resulting grief and bursting with the resulting joy.
When we talk about God “being” love, we usually mean that in our small understanding of love – all positive and affectionate. The reality is even better than that – he loves us in his understanding of love, which is much more complicated and not as rosy Sunday-schoolish, but is better in the long run…
Why does God love? I don’t know. Does God need to love? I don’t know. Does God need to be loved? Again, I don’t know. But I know that because God loves, I have hope. And I know that because God gave each of us the desire to love, he must have thought it was important for us to do so.
May we continue to grow in our understanding of the ways in which God loves; our appreciation for the fullness of grace, justice, mercy, love and redemption; and our ability incorporate these values into the way we love others, ourselves and God.
“Let justice and grace become my embrace.”
~ Inside Out (Joel Houston)
Be Prepared! (for a variety of random comments)
In my fourth year history seminar on British imperialism, I had to write a paper about the cultural significance of the Boy Scout movement on British colonies. One of the little facts that stuck in my head better than others is that Baden-Powell actually chose the motto “Be Prepared” because it was his initials. Not a coincidence – he started with his initials and then decided “Be Prepared” would work alright… I think he had a bit of an inflated ego… but it’s been awhile since I read the book, so I could be mistaken! :P
As I write this, the I Love Lucy episode with Charles Boyer is on my television. It’s only just dawned on me that this episode is based on the same gag as the Dore Schary episode – Lucy hires a “random actor” to play the role of Charles Boyer and Dore Schary and the gag gets flipped on her when she finds out the person she hired is the man himself. It’s a pretty funny gag…
I sang along to every song except “Church on Fire” at church today, because that one is WAY too fast (although I managed to get a few lines by the final repeat).
I met an 8yr old today and I think she was afraid of me. I’ve never had a child react like that before – it was weird. Maybe she was just tired from the long plane ride here (from Canada). She kept staring at me and shying away ever time I smiled, and wouldn’t sit next to me in the pew at church.
I can’t believe how many guitar chords I can remember now! I’m up to probably 10 or 12! Not that I can play them all well, and I still have at least two beats pause before I get my fingers right for an F chord, but I’m progressing… :) and enjoying the pastime.
Dad comes on Friday! I can’t wait!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am so excited!
I watched the movie Persuasion last night at a friend’s house. It was absolutely HILARIOUS!!! It is my favourite Jane Austen book (I’ve read 4 so far) and the movie did such a good job of playing up the hilarious characteristics of the characters. If you’re looking for a good read, this would be one I’d recommend. It’s different from the other ones I’ve read because S&S, P&P and Emma are all about young girls and matchmaking, and Persuasion is all about a girl who turned down a man eight years ago and so is older now and regretting that decision. I love Anne Elliot – a great main character.
The grade 2 class at school is fundraising all year to buy chicks for orphans in Africa (I think…) and the latest idea they’re doing is having teachers paint plates for a silent auction. A parent donated the plates, and a bunch of teachers are all painting whatever they want to on them – it’s amazing how well they are turning out! I’ve got my eye on one or two I’d like for myself! Here’s the plate I painted (click on it to see the detail):
Life is good right now. Not perfect, but it never is – what’s good is learning to be content and constant in the reality of everyday life. And slowly but surely, I’m getting there. Every day is another step in the right direction, another shot at nurturing and growing the “adult” I know I should be and taming and training the “child” still inside me…
The audio for this Lucy episode said “Academy Award” and the Spanish subtitles said “Oscar”.
I moved things around in my kitchen – I keep trying to make it feel “right”, but it’s still not there yet… At least everything is put away. I’ve just got one little pile of papers in my spare room left to put away somewhere logical, and then everything is nicely where it belongs.
Scholastic book orders for March and April are out and I’m going to order book #1 in the new Rick Riordan series – the Kane Chronicles (or something like that). Other books are good, but his I just can’t put down!
I need to email my landlord to see about putting up some artwork on the walls. I bought some student artwork at a charity auction that is really quite nice, and it’d be a good touch to get it up on the walls (once I get it framed – but I don’t want to invest in that if I can’t put nails in the walls).
Well, it’s time to head to bed, I think. :) Have a good week!
Final random comment – this post was actually going to be a serious post about some stuff I’ve been thinking about with regards to the idea of being prepared for what God has called you to do down the road, but as it turns out, I’m too tired to put those thoughts into words well right now. I’ll have to do that later… :)
Someone’s getting excited……..
… that would be ME!!! And I am getting excited because…
Dad’s coming to visit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I can’t WAIT to see a family member in person again! :P Seriously, I am SO excited!!! He’s really just passing through on business, but I get two weekends and I am absolutely THRILLED to see him again! :D
*beaming*
Okay… moving on…
My Thai is coming along well, though of course, mostly what I see is room for improvement… When push comes to shove, I’m actually becoming quite capable of communicating. I feel like I’m adding to my vocabulary daily, and my reading and writing are moving forward, too! On Tuesday, I officially learned the short vowels and am currently working on committing another two sets of tone rules to memory. I learned that in most cases, two consonants with no written vowel have an assumed short /o/, which is a pretty handy piece of information! The last thing Thai is, is phonetic. BUT the good news is that as you learn the rules, things start to make sense.
I’m continuing to enjoy church and am learning new words there every week. I can officially read and sing along to almost all songs at church (super fast ones excepted), and understand more and more of the words each time through. I’m attending a Thai cell group on Saturdays, too, which has been such a great opportunity to meet more Thai people in a Thai context. A couple of them want to work on their English, but for the most part, they’re pretty good at not speaking too much English to me… :) I’m working on understanding what I hear, but hope to work up the nerve to speak more soon!
It’s kind of funny, but I feel like all of my mental language organizers have completely broken down and when I’m on the spot or even just thinking to myself, I literally end up with English, French, Spanish, Thai and even Nepali words all jumbled up together. The other day, my teacher was asking me questions trying to get me to use the word purse, and I just sat there thinking, “I know it’s not jolaa, I know it’s not jolaa…..” It’s pretty neat that I remember ANY Nepali, as that was not a particularly successful venture… :P It’s also pretty neat how once something is in your brain, it must stay there somewhere – I took 3 years of Spanish in high school (enough to learn all the tenses and read a novel), but haven’t taken any since then. I leave the Spanish subtitles on while watching I Love Lucy, and I can’t believe how much I still understand…
Oooh! I just heard thunder! I’m hoping for an early start to the rainy season, because it’s my favourite, but I know it’s too early for that. I’ll take the odd storm here and there, though! :D
I went swimming with my class the other day. It was the last day of the swimming unit, so teachers were invited to join their classes. I’m so glad I did – it was such a relaxing and fun time to spend with my kids.
Here’s a picture I edited the other night. To make it clear, Harley and I were in one picture, and Marilyn and the horse were in another – she was standing behind the horse in such a way that just a little cropping to get rid of the rest of the horse made it look temptingly realistic… :P
So, I’ve been thinking a lot about callings and God and everything, especially recently. I was going to share some things, but I can’t get them out in a way that satisfies me yet. I hate being misunderstood or having to defend myself against attacks on a certain choice of words, so I’ll wait until I’ve figured it out better… but I’m really excited with what God is doing in my thinking and perspective right now… God truly is amazing and awe-inspiring…
Well, I’m exhausted. I’ve been ploughing through some fun lesson planning and working on some curriculum alignment things to prep for next year and have had a super productive day. Now I think I’m going to do something mindless… maybe update my website… it’s been awhile…
Anyway, I’m off. I hope you have a great day!
February Thoughts…
How have I not posted since December???
So far, this year’s been a great one! I’m finally all moved into my own apartment that actually feels like a home instead of a dorm, and is finally somewhere I can feel permanent. I expect and, more importantly, CAN live here until I leave Bangkok, whenever that will be… What a lovely feeling! This place has two bedrooms (enough room for my family to stay when they visit!) and a living room/kitchen larger than my entire apartment on campus. I feel like I’m living in a palace!!! Also… it came with a microwave! Definitely something I’d never buy for myself after having gone without for about a year (I only used the one in Nepal twice b/c of power outages), but I am SO enjoying having one now!
I am very much enjoying my class – really, I do have an amazing group of students! I’m definitely learning a lot as a teacher this year (I’d hope so… it’s still my first full year in a classroom of my own…!) and really feel the responsibility I have in my classroom. I mean a little bit about the learning/curriculum part, but really, mostly I’ve been struck with the more social or personal aspects of that responsibility… I remember like yesterday things that my teachers grs 4,5,6 said to me or did in our classroom that hurt my feelings, made me feel insecure or upset me in some other way. I also, of course, remember the things that those teachers did that really touched me and encouraged me. I’ve really been struck with the knowledge that I AM that teacher for my students – when they think back to grade 4, it will be my words and my actions that make those reflections positive or negative. I want my students to know that I really do see so much potential in each one of them. I want to be someone who speaks life into them – who encourages them and builds them up. I think being in a Christian school context where I am allowed to share my faith with my students really increases the responsibility. My students and their parents know that I am a Christian, and I want my actions to convey not only that I value and see potential in each of my students, but that God does that even more… I want to make sure that my words and my actions in my classroom (and in my life in general, of course) don’t make it harder than it already is for my students to believe…
It’s a lot of responsibility, but I really appreciate God first of all making me aware of this, and also walking me through it – giving me special conversations with my class and guiding me through them, helping me fix the times I handle things less than optimally, and reminding me that ultimately, it is he who touches the spirit and it is simply a gift to me that I can (hopefully) play some part in that.
Being a teacher myself now, I often think back to some of the more negative experiences I had with my teachers growing up (not many, of course – I don’t mean to paint an awful picture of my teachers!) and I wonder what made them respond so harshly or choose those words. At the time, with my 11 year old mind, of course, I thought they were awful and had it in for me. But now, knowing all of the other things going on in my life besides the teaching, I can’t believe how well I’m able to keep my personal life out of my classroom, and the occasional sharp word or loss of patient tone seems pretty good! It makes me wonder what was going on in my own teachers’ lives when they were cranky in my classes.
Since arriving in Bangkok, I’ve had to deal with the death of my grandpa and most recently my great-grandpa, and the unexpected, near death experience of an old, dear friend. I showed up at school that morning at 6:30 in tears waiting for my prayer partner to arrive, not knowing if this friend would make it or not, praying, crying out to God for her life. At 7:20, I was in my classroom with 17 silly ten year olds excitedly trying out different ways to wear our matching bandanas (or “bananas” as some of my kids kept saying…) for the upcoming field day. I was smiling, even laughing, in just a matter of moments, and managed to save the tears for my prep periods… They had no idea. They still don’t. It makes me wonder what my teachers were going through that I just had no idea of…
I guess more importantly (because after all, those teachers are WAY in my past! well… maybe not WAY… I wouldn’t want to age myself too much!) it makes me wonder what other people are going through right now that I just have no idea of.
When a co-worker shows up and with one cranky word sucks all the fun out of my day, I need to remind myself that she’s got her own life going on, too… When a student seems to be “trying my patience”, I need to remember that each of them has their own life going on, too. The same way I so dearly hope that my students and my co-workers see my heart both for God and for them even on the days that are rougher than others, I know that I need to strive to see their hearts even on the days when it’s really hard to look past the surface behaviour.
Well, I’ve still got some work to finish up tonight, and it’s getting late, so I’d best leave it there. :)
Take care, and God bless!
A Quick Thought About Boxes
I know I am a pretty linear and organized thinker, but I also fancy myself a tad creative in certain areas, and certainly willing to think outside the box in order to get things done. Not the most creative person, I know, but certainly more flexible and creative than I used to be (?).
Anyway… the point is…
Yesterday, I discovered there are boxes I live inside that I don’t even know about!
My friend’s didi taught us how to make a Tibetan dumpling soup yesterday. I watched her mix up the flour and water, and roll it out into a large, flat circle. She picked up a knife and proceeded to cut the dough into strips (and ultimately into squares).
As I was watching, I noticed her lines weren’t ruler-straight (not a problem, I was just watching carefully). Finally, she ended up with one strip of dough that was thin enough for one square at the top and gradually widened to twice as wide at the bottom. I wondered what she would do about it and briefly sorted through the options – leave it and have some squares larger than others, or cut it down the middle and have some squares smaller than others…
I watched her hold her knife over the row and think about her next move.
Finally, she placed the knife down halfway along the row – at the point where it finally got wide enough for two squares – and proceeded to cut only half of the strip in half again.
I have to be honest – that option never occurred to me. In my mind, I had to cut the whole strip, or leave the whole strip – cutting only half of it wasn’t even an option…
And it was at that moment when I realized that I live inside boxes I don’t even know exist.
I don’t know that I necessarily have a problem with that – I just think it’s important to recognize it and stay aware of how those boxes may show up in my life from time to time, and to deal with them accordingly…
A Quick Thought About Jonah…
There is a lot of emphasis in the story of Jonah on the fact that Jonah went exactly the opposite way from where God wanted him to go. It occurred to me reading it the other day that because that is true in this story, it can tempt us to be confident in the fact that we’ve never gone 180 degrees away from where God wanted us to go. I mean, when you think about that, that’s a really big deal! It’s a pretty “in your face” action toward God and while some people certainly do take that bold action, I’d hazard a guess that most practicing Christians would have difficulty actually carrying out a plan to purposely go 100% in the wrong direction away from God.
However…
Remember when you started using protractors in math class? You learn very quickly that drawing an angle just a few degrees “off” doesn’t show too much when drawn small, but as soon as you start to extend the lines, it becomes easy to see how off base your angle really is. We all know that if you steer your plane or your rocket just a degree off course, you could end up in a different country, or a different planet – and we would all readily recognize that as being just plain wrong.
I wonder how many times we, as “good Christians”, make decisions that we, in our human minds, view as being “close enough” to what God asked us to do that it will be essentially “the same”. How many times do we do almost what was asked of us, but cut just a bit short for one selfish reason or another? Only with the benefit of hindsight (or “God sight”) will we see just how “off” we ended up…
I hesitate to give an example, because it is such a personal issue – just between you and God, but I will give one to illustrate, and just take it for what it is – an example of a concept, not a textbook case to be picked apart or “yeah but what if…”ed. :)
It’s the little things that are most easy to rationalize – especially in a culture like the one we live in (in the West, I mean). For example, if God says to ask a stranger to come to your church, and you strike up a conversation and make the person feel special but resolve in your heart to only mention church if it “comes up naturally”, then that’s a degree off from the direction God set for you. Sure, it’s “better” than just walking past the person and ignoring them, but is it fully walking on obedience to God?
This could be applied to anything – it’s one of those strictly-between-you-and-God things, and no one else can ever know or tell you (without a word from God themselves) how this applies to you. It’s just, if you keep making decisions that leave you 1 degree off course, then eventually, you’ll be on a whole different path from the one God had first planned for you… which is not to say that leaves you hopeless, but it’s certainly not ideal!
Sometimes things just pop into my head…
If I could change just one line in the movie Pride and Prejudice, I would change Darcy’s “I assure you that in this matter argument is fruitless” to “resistance is futile”.
Just, you know… for all of those dual Jane Austen/Star Trek fans out there….