My seemingly regular Tuesday update

I think everyone should be dog people. I’m not saying that everyone should like dogs more than cats, but that everyone should be more like dogs than they are like cats. And here is why.
When a dog knows you, it is loyal to a fault. It shows unashamed love to you. It will come in leaps and bounds when it is called. It will mourn when it is left at home alone and will rejoice when you return. It relies entirely on you and does not doubt that its needs will be met. And this is my favourite part: If you rebuke a dog, it will put its tail between its legs and slink away, but always with an eye for returning the instant you speak its name. Dogs show perfect love, even to a fault. They will return even when they shouldn’t.
Cats, on the other hand, just don’t care. They won’t come when you call, but oddly enough they will come when they know you are going to give them something. They will spend time with you when it is fun, sometimes, but only when they feel like it. They are lazy and snobbish. As far as I can tell, they figure that they are in charge and you are its indentured servant. You know, that might be fallout from the times of the Egyptians when they were worshipped as gods. The cats never forgot.
Most of you probably know where I’m going with this, but for those of you who don’t, here’s the point I’m making: We have a perfect master who will never let us down, who will never abuse us, who will only rebuke us when we deserve it, and will always love us and have time to spend with us all the time. He never leaves us, so we don’t ever have to mourn. Our needs will always be met. So why do we act like cats around Him, ignoring his calling, only coming when we think we are going to get something that we want? We all act like we are the masters and He is our servant. He did say that He came to serve, but that does not mean we are better than Him. That means He has shown us how we should be acting.
I would love to say that I run to Him with unashamed joy every time He calls. I would love to trust that my needs will be met, no matter what else is going on. I would love to know how to love the completely. I would love to always be willing to learn from a rebuke and be willing to come back without being bitter or storing up the pain in my heart. Woof.

Yaaaaawwwwwwwwnnnknnn

Hello everyone. It has been almost two months since the Christmas break ended, and I have yet to have had any time off. We get one day a week off (on Monday, so not even a weekend) and only a few hours in the afternoon of every day, except the weekends where we don't really have set time, we just have to squeeze an hour here and there if we can. I am ready for a weekend off. Three more days.
Luckily for me, I have never really been a great communicator. As a friend of mine said (in reference to himself) "I'm great at receiving emails, but not quite as good at sending them". How true. It has been a long two months and as time has gone on, I have had less energy for staying in contact with people. I am sorry, I will try to do better. But not until next week.
Toodles

Mm-mm-good

On Sunday we ate a genuine Korean meal, and I now understand why in general Asians are skinnier and healthier than North Americans. Assuming, of course, that they have enough food to eat.
The meal was a mixture of mushrooms, radishes (long, white radishes that looked like giant white carrots), cucumbers, onions, carrots, zuchinni, ground beef, spinach, and rice. All of the ingredients were sauteed up and then arranged neatly in a bowl (presentation is important in a Korean meal) and then served. There was a hot sauce that could be mixed in, and it was a very tasty hot sauce, nice and spicy, but also possessing an actual flavour, which I find many spicy foods do not - it is just spicy for the sake of being hot. It was very filling, extremely tasty, and there was virtually nothing bad in it. Oh, there was also a fried egg on top. Everything is mixed together to eat, and it was soooo tasty. I cannot emphasize enough how good it tasted. I could eat that regularly. And it would probably be better for me in the long run.
That being said, a good steak is a very fine thing, and God gave us pizza to help make the sting of losing the garden of Eden a bit easier to take.

Hello Again

All right, I am back. I do apologise for such a long delay between updates, but this has been a hectic month so far. Well, it has been an energy draining month, that would explain it better. It started as soon as the guys got back, getting used to a regular schedule again, instead of my holiday schedule of sleeping until late morning (or early afternoon on occasion). I have to say that to an avowed night owl, eight a.m. seems to be awfully early. I realise that some of you have to be up a some insane hour of the morning (five a.m. is an ugly, ugly time to be awake), but when you don’t go to bed until two or three in the morning, eight is too early.
But I adjusted quickly enough and truth be told it isn’t a problem at all. I don’t mind mornings much, and it’s not like it has been terribly cold, which always makes mornings tougher. But more on that later. The first week was fairly uneventful as the kids all got back into the swing of things, as did the staff. We all shared our vacation stories and had a relatively relaxing week to ease ourselves back into the routine of school. And then the second week hit, and thus the start of all the troubles.
The theory that has been floated is that the students all went back to their ‘home countries’1, such as Mongolia, Turkey, Albania, etc, and when they came back there was a large intermingling of exotic viruses. And then there was a large intermingling of sick people. And then there was very little intermingling of anyone at all. Every day there were more people sick, peaking finally on Thursday (or maybe Wednesday) with about a quarter of the population of the school home sick. Our dorm was particularly hard hit as even our staff was down. We have seven staff members, and five of them were too sick to do anything but lay around and try to recover. I didn’t see one RA for three days except for a couple of times where she forced herself to get up and out of her room. She did not look terribly well, though. Kind of like death warmed over, as the saying goes. I was one of the lucky ones in that I wasn’t deathly ill. I just had a slight headache and a very minor cough. I had most of my energy and was well enough to function. One other RA was feeling much the same as I was, so the two of us largely ran the dorm for a couple of days. One day we had 20 of 41 people in the dorm sick. It was a very unhappy dorm that week.
I managed to fight it off until Friday, but that was the day I crashed. That day we had home basketball games, and when that happens we often have a ‘hot lunch’ at the school. A hot lunch is exactly what it sounds like - a lunch that is hot. Usually they take sandwiches for lunch, but once every couple of weeks we take a lunch and serve them at the school, as a bit of a treat and a break from sandwiches. On home basketball days, the central kitchen, which usually provides us with suppers, provides a lunch instead, and then supper is provided by the concession stands at the game (so a burger or hotdog, or something of that nature) and everyone stays at the school to watch the games. It is a bit of a busy day for the staff, as you can imagine. And that is what I woke up to on Friday.
I was dreading it. I couldn’t sleep on Thursday night because the sickness was finally hitting me. I woke up on Friday just dreading the prospect of having to do all that work at the school for their lunch, and then spend the evening at the school, chaufferring the students back and forth and whatever else had to be done. It made my heart quail. But I got up because I knew that not everyone on our staff would be well enough either. I put in one contact because my other eye felt like it would explode at any second and I didn’t want to touch that side of my face.
I went downstairs and helped clean up breakfast a little bit, and then we started our regular morning meeting. I wasn’t contributing much, just listening to what was being said. Suddenly I realised that everyone had stopped talking, so I started trying to figure out why. It suddenly came to me that my eyes were cold and I pictured what everyone must have been seeing. My eyes were closed, my head was leaning back on the couch, and my mouth, I realised, was open. The reason they were all silent was because they were looking at me sleeping on the couch. So I sat up and opened my eyes and smiled at the laughter this spectacle had caused. And so they sent me back to bed. I slept for a few more hours and felt much better. Saturday was better, and Sunday I felt a little sick near the end (I think I had a slight fever) but I got through to my day off where I rested the entire day. By then the rest of the students and staff were basically better as well.
The next week was spent in recovering energy and getting my equilibrium back. I am calling that sick week a wash, it doesn’t really count. We are back on track now, though, which is a good thing. Hopefully I will be able to keep up with the BLOG a bit better now.

1 I put quotes around ‘home countries’ because, due to the fact that these students are missionaries, the concept of a home country is a fluid thing. Most of them are American, Korean, or Canadian citizens, but none of them live in any of those countries. Some of them have barely even visited their country of citizenship. So when they go ‘home’, it is usually to their parents’ mission field, which in many ways is also not their home country as they are not a member of the culture. It is a difficult concept for them at times.