Home Thoughts From Abroad

Happy Birthday, Abi

Love to you from Grandma and Grandpa.

We are thoroughly enjoying this season of life in which we get to be parents of adult children which is, I might add,  much easier than being the parents of teenagers. There is real joy in seeing your family growing and enriched by new additions, without the pain and sleepless nights of childbirth.

Grandkids are a wonderful blessing but so too are those young adults that your children marry. Both Jon’s wife Nicole, and Liz’s husband, Greg, are just exactly the people that Steve and I prayed and hoped our children would marry: people that both enrich and fulfil our children’s lives.

Below is a little story told by Liz in a recent post on her blog, which gives some insight into the type of husband Greg is and why we are so thankful that he is part of our family.

Reason #185 Why I Love My Husband

Maybe a little background first so this all makes a little more sense: I usually take my engagement ring off at night to sleep. My fingers swell at night, and also the blankets get caught up on my diamonds. So I keep the wedding band on but I put the engagement ring in its box on my nightstand.

Due to my body’s continuing acts of mutiny, recently I’ve been feeling like a miserable, unattractive old prune. Which, needless to say, has made me more than a little insecure. But instead of being dismissive, or annoyed which is what I would probably be, each morning this week my amazing and incredibly supportive husband has picked up my ring and held my hand and asked me to marry him. Being proposed to by the man I love before the sun is even up every morning is a fantastic start to what would have been some hard days.

Of such kindnesses are long and healthy marriages made.

One of the great joys of this past year was reconnecting with Rosalind, my cousin, who did us the honour of traveling all the way from the south of England for our daughter’s wedding. Shortly after her return to England she was struck with labyrinthis and was unable to work for a time. A devout and deeply committed Christian, she struggled to make sense of her illness, and the Lord’s purpose in it. I have asked her permission to print her her reflections on that journey through her illness in order to encourage those who are going through physical trials that tax their spirit and sap their strength. This is her story:

Labyrinthitis.  Ten weeks ago, I’d never heard of it.  I’m now in the eleventh week of living through it, knowing it intimately.  As intimately as God knows me. Day after day, needing to be well and get back to work, I awoke giddy, sick, and fatigued.  I wanted to get on with my life, but all I could do was rest.  Without rest, the virus directly triggers ME, which would mean a long illness.  And I already knew of someone who’d had labyrinthitis for ten months.

Rest.  Sounds enviable? Yes, but not when you lose interest in everything – television, dvds, music, knitting, needlepoint, writing, reading, cooking – are too ill to go for a walk, and are not allowed to drive.  

Usually, I’m a very busy person.  Doing nothing, feeling useless and often tearful because of the virus, gave me a revealing glimpse of old age.  I couldn’t use my skills.  I felt a burden to those around me.  Isolated.  Purposeless.  Futile.  Each day seemed endless, yet passed far too fast.  All that wasted time – days of my life – slipping past, out of my reach, beyond my ability to use to the full.

Such emptiness forced me to reflect.  Events I’d resolved and forgotten surfaced from my past.  With nothing else to do, I dwelt on them, and became convicted of my unworthiness and sinfulness.  Incidents, words, thoughts, that at the time hadn’t seemed particularly regrettable, let alone sinful, revealed themselves in all their ugliness and horror.  How could I have done such things?   They weren’t trivial, but unacceptable to God.  Why hadn’t I been kinder, more thoughtful, less self-centred, better for God, and more reflective of His beauty and grace?  I loathed myself, and repented, over and over before Him, of all these unwitting errors.  Things left undone; other things not done well enough.  Even things I’d long ago received forgiveness for, I was pricked by as if they’d only just happened.

I was so sorry, and so unworthy.

Into this desolation our Father came, with love and comfort.  As I sat in forced idleness, feeling giddy and unbalanced and sick, I felt Him very near.  He revealed himself in a beautiful, intense, loving, comforting presence, which never left me.  He dwelt in me, and – most precious! – I was allowed to dwell deeply in Him, drawn unimaginably close.    

Then, one morning, repenting again of a sin, I had an astonishing revelation.  I no longer needed to repent of it.  My Father had made me new.  The person I had become, through His grace, had been totally forgiven.  The past belonged to the “old Rosalind”.  My sense of forgiveness and renewal was so strong it was as if the old me was sitting at my side, separate from the new me that God had brought into being.

The more loathsome my state, the more precious His love.  How gracious a God – so great, so lovely, so pure – to see worthiness in me!   Grim weeks of illness were being turned into a wonderful opportunity to know Him more and more.  Now there was a glowing jewel embedded in my dull days: His companionship, understanding, and overwhelming love.

During my walk with God, two things have been difficult to understand.  His love for me (I had a loving father who routinely abused me physically) and the idea of Him having a plan for me.  His love, His care, His passion for relationship, became abundantly obvious.  I felt loved as never before and, at last, I was able to accept His love fully, knowing I was made new in Him.

As for God’s plan: that, too, became clear.  I could see it mapped out for me in the significant events of the past few years, in the illness that claimed my present, and in His promise for my future.  Our Pastor once said, “Lay hold of God – and he’ll lay hold of you” – a truth I have experienced more than once.  But the way God laid hold of me this time, revealing His plan, was astonishingly powerful and absolute.  I personally discovered that when He decides to do something, no-one, nothing, will stop him.  Feeling His resolute force in my small life would have been terrifying if it hadn’t been so marvellous, awe-inspiring, exciting.

The time of illness showed me something else.  We are all too busy.  We know it, as we awake each morning – with God, but powerless, most of us, to resist the pressures, stresses, treadmills, of work and daily routine.  Every day, confronted by people’s expectations, we push ourselves further, or are forced into exhausting, spiritually draining busyness.  Not many of us have the leisure and tranquillity to meet Him as totally as we aspire or long to, every day of our lives.  We’re tired; we’re worried; our minds are churning with all the things we need to remember for the day ahead, or the next day, in which there is never enough time or energy.

God grieves that our lives, in this society, are so overwhelmed with worldly demands and concerns.  He wants to lead us by still waters, to restore our souls, and our understanding, love, and knowledge of Him.  He is there, at our elbow, even in front of us, waiting.  Our God, our heavenly Father, has to wait in our world, for us to see Him.  He wants us to recognise him, in all his beauty and majesty – and in the humility that sent Him to earth as one of us.  He loves us.  He yearns to know us all, individually, as fully as possible.

We need to struggle against the things that prevent us from dwelling in Him, and Him from dwelling in us.  He is our priority.  How can we make more time for Him? Trust Him.  Nothing can stop God’s work in our lives.  We may not always understand, but we can always trust. By opening ourselves to Him in total trust, we can find Him.  The more we open, the more He can lay hold of us, and help us to lay hold of Him.  Trusting in Him, we dwell in Him.

All aspects of life are lived out in the presence of God, who cares about every one. Realising that the whole of life belongs to God is essential if we are to serve him effectively.  Give every aspect of your life to God, praying that you may experience his presence in it all. The blessedness of God is waiting for us, even in the dark days of our lives. Whether we can see Him or not, he is there: He sees us.  He freely offers us forgiveness, redemption, the chance to renew ourselves in Him, to consecrate ourselves to Him.  Let’s pray to Him to open our eyes to His presence!

Coffee Bean, Sunway Pyramid: This might be one of my favourite spots in Subang Jaya, where we live. It has a nice view of the mall and the skating rink and is both spacious and protected. I can see the world going by without being obtrusive. It has comfortable chairs, internet access and electrical outlets to keep my computer charged while I am working. There is a clean washroom close enough that I can leave my stuff at the table for a minute without having to wrap everything up. The soy lattes are the best in Asia and I can sit all day for the cost of one, which is about four bucks. It also gets me out of the apartment, which although is undoubtedly ‘cosy,’ can seem a little confining at times. What is not to like?

There is never anything that my allergy regime will let me eat in such places, so I always carry a couple of allergy-friendly granola bars. Although I miss Pam (she is in Singapore meeting with her head of mission), I recognize that she does not have the patience to just sit in such places for extended periods of time. She would be off ‘shopping,’ which for her – as she spends very little money – simply means cruising the mall until I feel inclined to leave. So there is always the pressure of knowing that she wants to be somewhere else.  When I am by myself I can dawdle as much as I like, which given the daily pressure to perform that I am under, pleases me a great deal. I like to dawdle; it is how I decompress.

People underestimate the value of dawdling; of downtime. This is when the mind, heart and spirit bind the many multicoloured experiences of the past days or weeks into a coherent whole. Socrates – if he in fact lived and wasn’t simply a philosophical/literary construct in Plato’s Dialogues – said that an unexamined life is not worth living. Erik Erikson in Identity and the Life Cycle said that integrity or despair were the two alternative outcomes at the end stage of life. I prefer to work on integrating my personality, rather than wallowing in despair, and value the time to examine what I am doing and “knit up th’unraveled sleeve of care” in order to make sense of this crazy life. Chilling at the Coffee Bean does that for me.

Along with blogging the experience, I am also charging my camera, reading in my Kindle, browsing news sites on my laptop and absorbing the ambience of one of Kuala Lumpur’s busiest malls on a crowded Sunday. The sheer scope of ethnic diversity in such a place is cause enough for several hours of reflection. I find the noise and bustle more of a shield than a distraction, one that allows me to drift through the deitrus of a distracted week and find some order in the chaos. It may look like I am vegetating, but I am actually cogitating. I would welcome your company, provided you allowed me time to reflect. Soy latte, anyone?

New Year’s resolutions are the province of the young. By my age we have leaned – often to our chagrin – that resolutions are much easier to make than keep. Basically you are not going to do what you are not inclined to do no matter how often you tell yourself to do it. Behaviour has to become habitual before change becomes permanent. We would save ourselves a lot of grief if we took a look at where we want the long term direction of our lives to go, rather than looking for quick fixes to sometimes intractable problems. In practical terms this means simply we need to reinforce our strengths and moderate our weaknesses.

My strength has always been my love of learning. God has made a marvellously complex and beautiful world. Mankind will never come to the end of discovering about it if we last a million years. I love discovering that world, either through literature, art, science, music, travel, or social interaction. An easy and productive resolution for me is to continue to learn throughout the coming year. I don’t need to worry about the specifics of that learning, since often that growth is organic rather than pre-planned. I might set out to learn Mandarin and find myself reading French instead. I might plan on developing music and find it is computer functions I spend most of my time with. I can’t really control all the specifics, since I have no idea what this year will bring. But I do intend to continue to learn at every available opportunity, and to continue to give deference to the One who enables that understanding. My resolution then is to spend less time in the coming year consuming, and more time creating, for that is the essence of learning.

My second resolution has to do with my weakness. I have a tendency to laziness. Nobody looking at me from the outside would suspect this, as I keep it well under control; but I assure you it is there. In order to moderate this weakness I need to more consistent in self-discipline. Again it really doesn’t matter how I discipline myself, only that I do so. I could say that I will get up at such a time and do this number of sit-ups to trim my flabby gut and strengthen my wimpy back, but that isn’t the measure of self-discipline. The measure is that I discipline myself in every aspect of my life from watching television to pausing for ten minutes every hour to stretch and unwind; to reading literature instead of pulp fiction; to leaving my room tidy instead of a disorganized mess. All of these things rebuke my sloth and train me to give a more careful account of my time to my Maker.

Now for the final resolution. As a Christian I understand that mankind in made in the image of God; that is to say he/she has mind, flesh and spirit. My first two resolutions speak to the mind and the flesh; the third must address the spiritual side of my nature. Again it is useful to look at the long term direction of your life; where you want to be at the end of it. Clearly, for a Christian, that goal is to be more like Christ. For me that means I need to be kinder and gentler; not just on others, but on myself as well. For this I need to call upon the Holy Spirit, for this is a deep work of the soul and will not be accomplished through human effort alone. Only God the Spirit can bring about spiritual change. For this I need to spend more time meditating on His word and praying in the spirit, which is what I plan to do in the coming year. And that is by far the most important resolution of all.

We are back in Hanoi, just briefly in order to catch a plane back to KL. This morning we caught a bus to ride across the island to the ferry on the north end of Cat Ba. The road was under construction, so it was touch and go for a while if we would even get through. But our driver had nerves of steel and powered through the gravel without slipping into the ravine that was mere inches away. When we got to the dock we discovered that our boat was much larger than the one we were on yesterday, and both smoother and quieter with a nice sitting area out of the wind, which was blustery and cold across the bay.

But we didn’t sit inside. The ferry cut across a stretch of Ha Long Bay we hadn’t seen before, and it was too lovely to leave just because of a contrary wind. So we sat huddled up on our deck chairs, bundled in all the warm clothes we could muster, and watched the glorious scenery go majestically by. Eventually we arrived in Ha Long City where we transferred to a vehicle for the next leg of the trip. There was the usual delay while they sorted out the hundreds of tourists onto their various busses and ferries. We were fortunate to get placed on a van that cut the travel time to Hanoi, and arrived just before the rush hour. A quick taxi ride with a very hostile driver brought us to the pleasant staff at the hotel we stayed at on our arrival in Vietnam, where we were treated like old friends. We had a nice meal at a little café overlooking the street, the kind of place that is not easy to find in this overwhelmingly utilitarian city. Then it was back to our hotel for an early evening before our 5 am wake up call.

During a chat with our tour group yesterday we discussed our impressions of the Vietnamese people. The reactions ranged from “hostile” and “aggressive” to “sullen” and “indifferent.” Nobody seemed overly impressed. But when I posted something similar a few days, a number of respondents disagreed. They are indeed a hard people, tough enough to have driven the Chinese out of their country and keep them out for a thousand years. Tough enough to have defeated both the French and the Americans within two decades in the last fifty years; no mean feat in any country’s history. That toughness and aggression is shown in their response to foreigners. During a motorcycle trip around Cat Ba on Sunday we stopped for a moment to get our bearings. A young girl passing by, no more than 6 or 7, contemptuously slapped my helmet visor in a random act of aggression that caught me completely by surprise. This is not the kind of response that we have encountered anywhere else in Asia. Someone is indoctrinating the young of this country in their xenophobia.

However we have also been met with consideration and courtesy on our trip to Ha Long Bay. We chatted with a young Vietnamese student on the van who was studying tourism. Everyone of her friends is studying tourism. Her English was excellent, and so was her attitude. This bodes well for a future of greater openness to outsiders. We also have to note that although the streets are narrow and the infrastructure is crumbling and decayed, the people here work hard at keeping their country clean; not something that you see in Malaysia, Cambodia or Sri Lanka. Construction is happening everywhere; streets are being improved, shoplots are being rebuilt.

These are an industrious and resilient people. Hardship has toughened them throughout their history, and their history has also taught them to be suspicious and resentful of foreigners. They have enough drive and resourcefulness to be an economic powerhouse in this part of the world; to rebuild their cities and develop their industries. They have a physically beautiful country, and it could well become a tourist mecca. They also have enough aggression and xenophobia to rule out any significant progress as a nation. The blocking of the social networking site, Facbook, is evidence of their paranoia. In short, they could go either way in the future, and Vietnam will be an interesting country to watch.

Ha Long Bay in North Vietnam is a World Heritage site and was recently selected as one of the seven new natural wonders of the world. There are nearly two thousand limestone islands in the 600 square miles of the bay. They are what are called karsts, tectonic uplifts of what was formerly sedimentary rock. From the look of the layers, some of that uplift was nearly vertical. Erosion by wind and water has then shaped these rocks into strange outcroppings; some looking like Sugarloaf Mountain in Rio, some looking like the ‘flowerpots’ of the Bruce Peninsula.

Today we took a cruise out into Ha Lan Bay, off the southern coast of Cat Ba island where we are staying, and around to the east and north of the island into Ha Long Bay itself. We shared the cruise with a dozen others, all young backpackers, from San Francisco, Vancouver, England, India and Germany. It was a wondrous journey, and pictures simply do not do the site justice. These scenic wonders spring from the water in dazzling variety; some looking like humpbacked dragons – ha long means descending dragon – some teetering precariously on thin stalks eroded to the point of collapse by the water. Our little boat wove its way through this water wonderland, every turn in the bay yielding a new vista. We were entranced.

After a couple of hours of this we dropped anchor in a secluded part of the bay and loaded into kayaks for a closer look. Erosion has carved caves and arches in the islands, making them ideal for exploration in kayaks. Pam and I were happy to be a craft we ourselves could manage, and spent a happy hour in our own little tour before returning to the boat for lunch. We were expecting noodle soup or some greasy fried rice. Instead we have steamed rice and vegetables, Vietnamese spring rolls and mackerel steaks. Another hour of cruising brought us to Bo Hon Island, site of the Sung Sot cave. We had heard nothing of this in any guide book and quite frankly we were not expecting to see much more than a few scruffy stalagmites and a tourist vendor. We were totally blown away by the most vast and massive cave we had ever seen. The cave was beautifully laid out with clear and clean flagstones quarried from the surrounding limestone, and with a minimum of artificial light to bring out the cave’s natural beauty. The view from the outer reach of the cave overlooking the harbor is the one that you see of Ha Long Bay on the Wikipedia site.

We had a brief spell of anxiety on the way home as the engine quite literally blew a gasket. It must be a fairly regular occurrence because the crew had a spare gasket on hand and managed the repair in forty-five minutes. Fortunately we were in a fairly open and protected part of the bay, and drifted peacefully along while the repairs took place. Half an hour later we were out into the open waters of the bay with their two metre swells. We stopped briefly on Monkey Island to feed the local residents who were happy to ‘steal’ our lunch leftovers and pose for pictures. Aside from them and a lone sea eagle, there was not much other wildlife to be seen.

It was a fantastic day of sights and experiences, and it was nice to have some fellow travelers to share the experience with and to talk about our various travels through South-East Asia. We finished our day with a decent meal at the Green Mango, recommended by our Aussie friend Jim, and not to be missed if you ever find yourself on Cat Ba Island. The weather may not have been the best at this time of year, but with no tourist crowds to contend with, we got to see some pretty amazing sights today. For my money the karsts looked even more mysterious and impressive arising from the mists as they came into view. We were glad we came.