sledding on christmas

on my day off

i made bread and ate it hot with butter and honey.

winter thoughts

The prayer of confession at church this morning was modern yet convicting:

Father, we confess that we are satiated and bored;
Creation has bored us.
Work has bored us.
Family has bored us.
Friends have bored us.
Out homes bore us.
Television bores us.
Redemption has bored us.
Truth has bored us.
You have bored us.
No generation in history has ever had so much to entertain it.
We are jaded and cynical.

We think the world is our servant, so we are not thankful when things go well for us, and we are not patient when they do not.

We believe every desire should be satisfied, so we are not delighted when they are, and we are not humbled when they are not.

We laugh, but we do not know joy.
We are captivated, but are never really awed.
We celebrate, but we do not worship.
Have mercy on us, and forgive us.

Amaze us with grace - blood stained, incarnate, Messianic grace - the glory of God in Christ.

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Last week we saw Rosie Thomas at the Triple Door. Hands down the best music venue I've ever experienced, and Rosie's stand-up comedy was as stellar as her songs were.

Juno is a great movie for adults. Written and acted flawlessly, it portrays the most sentimental moments without becoming sentimental. The soundtrack is a bit too precious, but apart from that I have no complaints. We were left with plenty to discuss about its portray of teens, sex, men, women, commitment, life, abortion, and adulthood.

Tonight we accompanied our housemate Eriko to her boyfriend's church Christmas service. Her boyfriend, Dien, is Vietnamese, and tonight five Vietnamese churches from Seattle gathered together to celebrate Christmas and share the Christmas story with their friends and relatives. The whole experience was beautiful, and felt more truly Vietnamese than most of our summer activities in Hanoi felt!

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I'm reading "River Town" by Peter Hessler, a Princeton and Oxford grad who spent 1996-1997 teaching English in China with the PeaceCorps. It's a book that's been recommended to me since 2003, when I went to Vietnam, but in those days I was studiously avoiding "China" tales in favor of books like "Catfish and Mandala" - Vietnamese stories.

What has amazed me about the first few chapters of River Town is how exactly his accounts mirror my experience in Vietnam. Reading it is emotional - remembering the honor and humiliation of being a foreigner, the delights of introducing literature to students unfamiliar with it, the loneliness, the absolute cultural lostness. Check it out and just read chapters one and two, about school officials and banquets and student essays and shakespeare performances. All of it is absolutely true.

I'm reading it now, in part, because there's a chance we will be going to China this summer. A friend of ours here, Peng, a Fulbright Scholar from Wuhan, wants us to lead a team of 4-5 teachers in putting on a two week English Language and American Culture program for a highschool in Wuhan. We are investigating the options.

it snows!