I wrote and (thought I) posted this post on April 20 at 6:53 PM. However, I just saved it as a draft instead of posting it. So here it is.
Here’s what I’ve been up to:
After coming in from Costa Rica late Saturday night, I packed for IGO. Tuesday night I slept in a bed. Wednesday night I spent working on the SMBI yearbook. The 2.5 hour drive home Thursday was very interesting. I stopped in Winchester to sleep for 15 minutes because I was weaving all over the road and had horrible reaction times, even though I was blasting music and A/C and hitting myself. I dropped off instantly, despite copious amounts of caffeine in my system. I groggily woke half an hour later to my cell phone ringing. The only time I was more disoriented in my life was when I came out of surgery. I had trouble breathing, I couldn’t think straight, etc. Poor mom on the other end of the phone–she was somewhat at a loss to communicate with my broken phrases and thoughts. I cranked the A/C full blast, which sobered me up and started my brain working again. I was very glad she had called–much more oversleeping would have been ruinous. I only had budgeted an hour to be at home before leaving for the airport. I felt loads better after the nap.
I got home and finished packing for 8 months at IGO. The whole family took me to the airport. I hopped a short commuter flight to JFK, New York. I sat beside a “secular” naturalized Israeli lady the whole way. She was on her way to Tel Aviv to visit family. We had a long spiritual discussion–she is an ardent post-modernist. I tried to witness to her, but she believed religion was simply a good social/cultural tool to form orderly and moral societies. She was an ardent pacifist, which allowed me to take a page from Paul’s Mars Hill discourse and play up pacifist/non-resistance parallels. However, that was just one more thing in which our “relative, self- & society-determined morals” coincided. I hearkened back to the excellent book The New Tolerance by Josh McDowell and tried to draw out all the egregious post-modernist contradictions, but they were all neatly deflected. Through this time I was praying and I finally appealed to her “God-shaped hole” which she acknowledged. One side of her family were Holocaust survivors and the other half did not survive. That is one of the big reasons she believes there is not a God. I drew from many Cliff Schrock classes to explain to her how God interacts with people and why there is so much pain in world that has an all-powerful, all-loving God.
When I got to JFK, I had a 4 hour layover which I spent laptop-ing. At 11:45 PM, I boarded a 747 for Taipei, Taiwan with a stop in Anchorage, Alaska. I sat beside a quiet American man in an exit row. The multitude of China Airlines stewardesses, in their skirts and hair up in a bun, were polite and helpful, but their English was somewhat less than ideal–one time I asked for apple juice and got orange juice. They were quite generously going seat to seat handing out glasses of wine. It was 6 hours to Anchorage and then 10 hours to Taipei. The sun finally caught up to us several hours before we made Taiwan landfall. It was a gorgeous, cloud-studded sunrise. I got to Taipei at 6 AM. On the way off the plane I met an American of Philippine (I believe) ethnicity. He was a Christian Realtor who knows a Mennonite home-builder from Anchorage by the name of Dennis (?) Byler. He wished me the Lord’s blessing as I ministered in Thailand. He was on his way to Manila to visit his family.
Relaxing in my comfy exit row seat from JFK to Taipei.
A feeble attempt to record the sunrise
Next I found a small, free internet room which is sponsored by a tech store located in the Chiang Kai-Shek airport. It has two desktops with net access and free wireless. That’s where I am now. Blessings to all! Thanks for those that prayed for me when I was driving home without sleep. I will soon post the rest of the Costa Rica updates.
I board my flight for Chiang Mai at 9:20.
2 Responses
April 26th, 2007 at 8:40 am
The Dennis Beiler, the gentleman (realtor) referenced, is my 1st cousin’s son who lives in Alaska. They moved from DE to Alaska.
April 26th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
I did the plumbing and heating in Dennis Byler’s house in the summer of 2003.
Leave a Comment