Home Thoughts From Abroad

Well it has been a long couple of days, but we are back in Canada, staying with two of our grown children in Calgary until Tuesday. Last night we went out to have a meal and watch the Penguins pull out a sqeaker against the Red Wings. Watching that cheap shot against Sidney Crosby made Pittsbug’s eventual victory all the sweeter. This has all the markings of an historic rivalry, as the Penguins lost the Cup last year to Detroit. I also lost by a sqeaker. losing the office pool to my buddy Dave St. Germain by one point. Next year, buddy!

It is so great being back in Canada again and wonderful to see Dave and Liz, who are both doing well and still working steady out here, despite an iffy economy. Hopefully with the oil prices on a rebound and things picking up again south of the border, they will be able to ride out this current financial storm and come out of it alright. Tomorrow we are hoping to do a little sightseeing and possibly get out to Banff if it is a nice day.

It is 3:30 here in Calgary at the moment, but that doesn’t mean a lot to my internal clock. We did manage about six hours sleep in Hong Kong and a few cat naps on the plane, but it has been 48 hours since we left for the airport in KL and my circadian rhythm doesn’t know what to think. We are just glad to be back in the true north strong and free and breathing some clean Canadian air. When we left KL the air pollution index was 139, on a scale where anything over 50 is starting to cause respiratory problems. When the sun is dull red disc in the sky through the pollution haze, it is time for a couple of weeks holiday.

Two years ago we flew through Hong Kong on our way to Malaysia and that one brief glimse was enough to convince us that we wanted to have a closer look. Today we got that chance. True it wasn’t the most favourable time of day: we arrived in Hong Kong at midnight, and our flight leaves shortly now at noon. But we did find a nice little hotel in the Wan Chi district at a reasonable rate, and after coffee and a muffin negotiated with a very nice cabbie for a one hour tour that took in some of the sights such as Victoria Peak and Recluse Bay. This is enough to ensure that we simply must get back for a a more extended say. Sorry we can’t post a picture now as the airport wifi is slow. We’ll try again in Vancouver.

Our best friends the first year we were here were Bill and Kim McNamara, an older couple from the Toronto area. Bill had retired as principal some years back, but Kim worked right up until practically the day they got on the plane. They moved into the Boulevard into a very nice apartment that we now enjoy, and immediately set to work to tranform this place for the better.

Kim and I shared a love for English, but she brought administrative competence to bear as well, writing what has become the manual for assessment here at Taylor’s. Bill was no slouch either, carrying the load in business studies and organizing volunteer activities. Bill and I shared a love for music, and he is the first person that I’ve met whose knowledge of the arcane minutiae of that era exceeded my own. Pam and Kim’s eyes would roll when we’d get going about Roy Orbison or the Moody Blues, or how Billy Preston ended up working for The Beatles.

Bill was an absolute brick when it came to building the set for the school play. There is nothing I could ask for that he wouldn’t have a solution to, and then would be willing to try. And if it didn’t work, he’d try something else. I delighted to hear of how he would handle difficult situations as a principal, always taking the shortest route between problem and solution, even if it meant bending protocol to get there.

He was a straight shooter, and I valued his advice. He was a man that you could instantly trust, and know he would never fail you. Both Pam and I did everything we could to convince the two of them to stay in Malaysia, we valued both of them so highly. But we also knew that their love for their children ran so close to their heart, that staying here was just too much for them to bear.

Bill was on his way to a baseball game yesterday when an aneurysm caused him to black out, leading to a fatal car crash. The news has stunned us all in Malaysia. Bill was not only well-respected, but well loved. We were due to meet him in just two weeks and our colleague Yen Sen has only just returned from visiting with them and our friends Ken and Susan. I almost cannot believe the news, my heart is having trouble catching up with my head. Bill, my friend, you will be sorely missed.

We you live overseas you don’t get to see your regular doctor that often. We are fortunate in that the school I work for flies us home once a year, otherwise we would be more or less stuck out here. So last year at this time we scheduled a visit with our doctor in St. Thomas that we have had since we moved there in 1979. A week before we boarded the plane to come home he cancelled on us, and closed his office for a month. No physicals for us that year.

This year, once again, Pam booked our physicals back in March so we could fit them in during my two weeks in Ontario. Last week his office let us know that our appointments had been cancelled. Those of you who live in Ontario know that this is all too common anymore, and none of us dare complain because doctors are so rare that you are fortunate if you have one at all.

So we had the work done here, and really what is the fuss all about? We went to a clinic, paid forty bucks Canadian and had the work done. For that we got a full work up, including cancer screens and a consult with a doctor on our results. I am, as I suspected, disgustingly healthy, with a BP that men half my age can only wish for and negligible cholesterol.

We really need to get on the same page back home. The model of public health that we have been clinging to doesn’t work. It is just not cost effective. Over here they run it as a business, and given a certain level of competition, that business is efficient and reliable. I’m sure OHIP back home isn’t paying out forty bucks for an annual physical.

Tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. I will leave for the airport to begin what will be two solid months of non-stop travel, visiting and work. It will be richly exciting, fulfilling, challenging and totally exhausting. We have been joyfully anticipating this for several months but I must say that both of us approach it with very mixed emotions. This is compounded by the fact that I will be away at a conference in Thailand for the next week while Steve struggles to finish marking, preparing for the Prom and the Grad and packing for Canada.

Obviously, we can not wait to see our kids and grandkids again. Ben is no longer the toddler we left behind but is very much a little boy now. Abi was a tiny little three month old baby but now is walking and starting to talk. We love to watch them interact with each other on our Skype calls but that is no substitute for holding them. That goes for our own children as well. Although no longer as cuddly, we still love to hug them when they’ll let us. We look forward to talking to them and getting caught up on all their news.

However, we know the emotional upheaval we will face as we visit with friends that we have not seen for a year and get caught up with their news as well, some of which will undoubtedly be painful to share. You can’t be away for a year without some trouble in the lives of those we care about. When you only get one visit per year in you don’t spend much time talking about the weather but go directly to what is emotionally and spiritually important. We are praying for the Lord to give us wisdom and strength, and remind us of the joy and comfort that only Jesus can give.

There is another trouble spot for us as well. Having lived here for over two years, there are some aspects of Canadian culture that we are not proud of, and it would be most comfortable not to have to deal with these aspects again. Here in the East we have seen so much dire human need and yet people here are doing so much for the Lord with none of the resources that we take for granted in the West. We need to rely on God and not to be too harsh on what we once also took for granted.

Ultimately, we will need to say another round of painful good-byes and tear ourselves away from family and friends once again. We will throw ourselves in the work Christ has called us to and that will relieve the heartache for a while, but it is not easy being literally on the other side of the world from virtually all those you love. It is an awesome privilege being here and serving at this point in our lives and we really would not change a thing. But that doesn’t mean it is easy.

There are a lot of you out there who like to think that you are original trekkers. Not so. You had to have been a Palladin fan first. You had to have grown up with a lot of corny westerns like The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke so that when Have Gun, Will Travel came along you recognized it for what it was: a morality tale wrapped in the guise of a western that featured tight dialogue and well-crafted scripts. You had to have been disappointed when Palladin’s lead actor Richard Boone’s next project – a repetoire company doing a series of television plays – was rejected in favour of Hawaii Five-O.  You would have to have recognized the divine providence involved in Boone’s best writer, Gene Roddenberry, leaving to do a morality tale wrapped in a space epic instead. That is how Star Trek was born, and I have been a fan from the beginning; watching every show, and delighting in the interplay of personalities and the subtleties of social criticism that it offered.

But here’s news: I never liked Kirk. He was a self-important pompous ass, as was (and is) William Shatner. I liked Spock: his cool reserve, his ascerbic wit. I liked his insight into the human condition. I liked the fact that Leonard Nimoy didn’t like Spock, and tried to distance himself from his alter ego (famously declaring “I am not Spock!”). I liked it that Nimoy refused to get involved in the excesses that Star Trek later indulged in, such as Star Trek: Generations, which managed in one show to make a travesty out of all the iconic material that Star Trek fans had spent a generation (there’s an irony worthy of a Vulcan) investing in the show.

Of this new show Nimoy says “These people, the makers of this film, awakened in me the passion I had when me made the original film and series. [Star Trek] went off in a direction that I didn’t relate to very well, that’s the simplest way to put it. I was put back in touch with what I cared about, what I liked about Star Trek.”  Me too. What  all the spin offs of this series failed to realize, and what Abrams recaptures, is the chemistry in the original characters. They are in fact living out Richard Boone’s original concept: a repetoire company of well-loved characters playing out a series of original scripts, comfortably the same, and endlessly new.

The show is great, and if you haven’t seen it I highly recommend it. It is the best in the series since The Undiscovered Country, and I don’t mind that Abrams has allowed the characters to morph slightly and develop elements that were not there in the original series, any more than I mind different interpretations of Lear or Willy Loman. However, I must admit I blanched a little when the elder Spock – who  incidentally brings the same unspoken gravitas to the film as he did throughout the series – wishes his younger incarnation “Good Luck.” Ouch! Is it too late to reshoot that scene?

You have come a long way in those 60 years and it has been such a joy and privilege to spend more than half of them with you. 

Thank you for the joy that we shared on our wedding day as we began this journey together.  Raising our three amazing children was absolutely delightful, and at times totally frightening, but we did it together and always had God to lead us. We rebuilt cars and renovated old houses and ventured to far away places and I have loved our life together. 

In so many ways, it feels like now is the opportunity to reap the benefit of many years of hard work and commitment to each other even through some difficult times.  I am so happy to be here in Malaysia with you, seeing the impact that you continue to have on the lives of the students that you teach.  Never one to take the easy way out, you are still using the gifts that God has blessed you with, to the fullest and I honour you for that.  I love you and look forward to seeing where God will take us in the adolescence of our old age.

We have seen a lot of countries in our lives. Somewhere up around forty by now, we think. And in all those countries we have seen many more cities. Some, like Paris and London are justifiably famous. Others like Orvieto and Colmar are underappreciated jewels. But we go to Singapore every chance we get for its cleanliness, modern architectural beauty and comfortable colonial charm, which it wisely preserves and enhances.

Pam had a conference, which she will blog about later, and Steve has a birthday coming up, which he undoubtedly – in his typically humble way – will crow about later. Both had a wish to enjoy a meal atop Swiss Hotel’s Stamford Towers on the 72nd floor overlooking Singapore Harbour. The meal was wonderful, the view even better, but each other’s company on a road that has taken us to so many of the world’s most beautiful places, was the most enjoyable thing of all for both of us. Surely God is good to those who have learned to let Him lead them along this road called life.

My parents went back to England when I was 18. My sister had already decided to move back herself and her new boyfriend, shortly to be her husband, solidified that decision. Wyn left with my parents and stayed with them for a while before moving on to a Kibbutz in Israel, leaving me with a difficult decision. Should I leave Canada, a country I had grown to love, to be closer to my family, or stick it out in Toronto alone?

Never one to close doors, I tried making my living in London, England for six months, slogging ale in a trendy pub in Soho called the Star and Garter. I didn’t mind the work, despite being up to my ankles in beer every lunch hour (the pub was a frenzy of activity, and with six of us in a tiny square of space, a fair amount of spillage was just one of the work conditions). What I objected to was the pay, barely enough to cover food, bus fare and rent and nothing put aside. In my tiny flat there were rats in the loo in the hallway, and not enough heat to keep the frost off the inside of the windows. It was a miserable way to live, and pretty standard in England in those days. Borrowing airfare from my brother, I high-tailed it back to Canada, and have been happy to be Canadian ever since. We have our problems as a country, to be sure, but of all the places I have travelled, it is by far the nicest, most decent place to live.

So it came with some true reluctance to file for non-resident status on our income tax form this year. No, we haven’t given up our citizenship, nowhere near. But we have declared ourselves to be non-residents of Canada. It is a step we never intended to take, but circumstances dictate otherwise. To remain residents will cost us too much in that we are forced to pay not only tax in both countries, but to also pay tax on our Malaysian income in Canada for the privilege of remaining residents of Canada. At the same time our residence in Malaysia ensures that we receive no benefit in Canada for the tax that we pay there.

We are, in some small sense, lowering the flag, and by doing so following the advice that we received two years ago when we came here. It has been only our stubborn national pride that kept us from acknowledging the obvious: now we bow to the inevitable leveler, the tax law.

This has felt like a long slog of trying to figure out exactly how we will be spending the semester end school break, but it is finally all coming together and as usual- in God’s good time.  Issues with passports and visas seemed endless but are falling into place.  All this simply served to ensure that Pam would be around for several meetings that we didn’t even know existed when we formulated the initial plan.

As part of Steve’s contract, the school pays for one trip home a year for both of us.  It sounds pretty straight forward but in fact that is not necessarily the case once you get the HR department involved.  We were dreading the battle, only to find that the tour company, which works for the school, has new staff that are wonderful  and have a bit of an understanding of geography.  It is really difficult to argue with someone who insists they will not pay for you to fly to Ontario when the contract states specifically that they will only fly you to Toronto.  Just try to add Calgary into that mix!

Jace gets it and was able to book us exactly what we want and at $5 under the price that the school will cover.  Consequently, we will leave KL on June 11 and spend the night in Hong Kong.  On the 12th we will fly out at noon to Vancouver, arriving there at 9:20 am on the 12th, thanks to the International Date Line.  We will then arrive in Calgary at around 3:0o pm for a four day visit with Dave and Liz.

On the 16th, following a meeting regarding ministry, we will head on to London, arriving around midnight.  We will be in the London area until Steve flies back to KL, arriving there on July 4th to recover from jetlag so he can begin teaching on the 6th. Pam will stay on until July 28th to get a little extra family time and to pursue some potential new developments in ministry.

We are looking forward to visiting with so many people but our calendar is filling up very quickly.  Let us know if you want to get together and we will happily work you in to our schedule!