English Essays.....LOL

I am in the midst of checking essays. Love this. It truly is priceless. The topic is "What do you look for in a marriage partner?" The point is to get them to write and correct English. It does not matter what topics I assign, so I might as well assign something useful to reflect on. It brings to mind some essays from last year that I posted on FB: "The meaning of life is just like frog floating in the air. When wind coming, it disappears." Frog? Also one of my friends here was warning us about encouraging the use of the thesaurus to find synonyms that might not fit. She had a student write, "When I first saw her, I felt it in my aorta." An older man wrote: "Childhood, formed by one after another of the amusing things, is a tune that haunts around my heart, and is an erudite book full of life philosophy, trivial but memorable." Further in the essay, the same man describes falling off his bike: "So it rushed out, and I fell d...

"Blessed Are the Meek" , book continuation

The Healing Power of the Beatitudes Eight Steps to Wholeness Chapter 3 Mt. 5:5 Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. OK. “Meek” This sounds a little better. A little less painful. Maybe,… but it is certainly not descriptive of how most of us are,….or even want to be. Who wants to be meek? Milquetoast? Doormat? Roadkill? Well, of course on one very profound level, this is not at all what “meek” means. But on another it does mean that kind of humility. But it is humility from strength, from choice, from sacrifice. Not finished yet The meek person realizes the meaning of PBPWMGINFWMY: please be patient with me, God is not finished with me yet. Romans 4:17New International Version (NIV) 17 As it is written: “I have made you a father of many nations.”[ a ] He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed— the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not [bold print mine] The meek ...

Adult Playgrounds/Role of Grandparents

About a block from our house is an adult playground. We are in a housing development owned by Peking University. It is a group of about 10 large apartment buildings built for the 2008 Chinese Olympic games. I think they are very nice apartments….but after years of living in third world countries maybe I am not the best person to assess this. I can say, that it is one of the nicest apartments we have lived in. If I walk or get on my bike and go about a block to the exit gate, I find an adult playground. I didn’t look closely at it for quite a few months. It looks like a kids’ playground and that is what I always thought it was, but then I examined it more closely. There are 8-10 pieces of equipment. Everyone is for adults. They are quite attractive and innovative, involving arms, legs, balance, speed, etc. What a wonderful idea! Chinese are very health conscious and this is another example of their way to keep active. I see many people there. Mainly it is older people and they oft...

Wearing a Skirt to Church

I made the mistake of wearing a skirt to church this morning. How can dressing nicely in a skirt be a mistake for church? Well, I thought it was moderately warmer, in the 40’s rather than 30’s this morning. I put on a long skirt, with my left knee brace that I wear all the time now. Then I added a pair of spandex knee length shorts and knee high boots. That only left my right knee bare technically. My left knee, which is bone-on-bone, and my right hip vie for which one is going to bother me the most. I have surgery schedule for my knee for Jan. 5 in PA, but I am withholding the final decision because I need to be sure I have enough recovery time for the 5 weeks I have in the US.   If I am just careful, life is doable.   However, biking is cold, and my arthritis is bad. I was in quite a bit of pain by the time I had gone the 2 miles to church. I brought my cane, but it was still hard to walk the block when I got to the hotel where our church is held. I told Rick if he saw me ...

What Color Are the Cars?

It is really strange that I did not notice the color of the cars in China until a few months ago. I certainly did notice as soon as we arrived one and half years ago how different the ambiance here was compared to what I had expected. We have lived in Asia before (1988-1995). The cities we were used to were brilliant to the point of being glaring. There was a plethora of lights: blinking, neon, garish. The ancient buildings had clashing colors and sweeping eaves, with lots of symbols embedded in the arches. Signs hung from every available surface with stylized characters advertising everything imaginable.(That dangerously blew down in every typhoon, and then were replaced waiting for the next big wind.) This is not what I see where I live now. There are big square sky scrapers for miles after mile. All street signs are sedate statements of street names and directions, in characters and pinyin.   There are signs painted directly on stores, but not hanging from the eves and the...

To Meet or Not to Meet? That Is the Question.

We are trying to have English study meetings again on Friday nights. Last week was the first one. I cannot explain thoroughly, but you need to know that any activity along these lines are being monitored closely.   Members of local worship meetings are being persecuted with loss of jobs and being asked to sign papers of renunciation of beliefs. Physical doors of buildings are even being closed. So we need to be careful, not for us so much as those who would choose to attend. Anyway, when I posted on our old Wechat site about our study of Luke for last week, we got a lot of new Wechat friends inviting themselves on that site. I am not too excited about this. I have no idea who these people are, nor where they are getting our site info. I DO want to let previous attenders know that we will be meeting again, but we have no intentions of large group situations. Last week one new man/student came. That was all, but we had a very nice discussion, and he says he will come back this ...

What If I Were a Maid in Another Culture

(Maybe we have solved the problem with "following" the blog and also notifying for new postings. Please let me know if following and notifying is working. Thanks.) I was thinking about the things in my apartment the housekeepers might find strange. I also reflected on some things I might find strange if I were a maid in another culture. (Some listed in no particular order or culture, but gleaned from years of living in South America, Africa, and Asia.) I bet the thought that you ALWAYS   must take off your shoes upon entering a house would seem needless to me, but I could understand that it would make my job easier. Finding used toilet paper in a wastebasket beside the toilet would seem so far beyond normal as to be outrageously gross and needless. I would question the closing of doors and windows in cold season. Don’t they know the heating systems have carbon monoxide that will kill you? I would compare the size and stuff in U.S. kitchens and be underwhelmed, and wonder ...

Final questions from "Blessed are those who mourn"

I think I have fixed the email connection. Please check and see if you are alerted when I blog.  Also, please become a "follower", which helps demonstrate that the blog is being viewed. The final questions from our chapter on mourning in our book: The Healing Power of the Beatitudes Eight Steps to Wholeness Chapter 2 Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. Matthew 5:4 Questions: 1.       1.   Emotional pain is usually harder to face than physical pain. Have you found this to be true? How much does our culture and societal expectations and taboos play into this statement? 2.        2.  Probably the biggest addiction area in our culture is money, and the power and prestige that go with it. Is money evil? Why does it engender so much evil? Is love of money an accepted societal addiction? How is money related to power and prestige? Lists some ways to hold money, power, prestige in p...

An English Tutoring Center

(I have been told that maybe there is no alert to your email since I changed the title of our blogpost to asiabeatitudes.blogspot.com. If this is true, I would like to know. I am not sure how to solve it , but I need to know if it is a problem. We continue to need "views" as we are now at least in a conversation with a possible helper in publishing our book.) We went to visit an English teaching tutoring center this morning. We had been put in touch with Fey through Michael Sapp, a friend from Senegal 15 years ago who lives here in Beijing!! Fey was looking for teachers. Upon reflection we realized that our visas probably precluded us being able to accept money for situations like this. However, we wanted to see if we could trade teaching for the use of a room to have our Friday night BOOK study. (We have found a possible coffee shop that might work for our study, but it is rather public.) However, as we talked with Fey we realized that it would be a matter of endangering ...

Every Chinese Child's Dream

I just biked the mile over to get some copying done at the University. As I have mentioned it is Golden Week, and everyone is on vacation. It is always very chaotic at the gates to get into the campus, but today was particularly crowded. There were about 50+ people being blocked from entering. The guards at the gate usually just check the ID that we hang around our necks and motion the students on in. However, most of these were families: mom’s and dad’s with an elementary age child, single mom’s or single dad’s with a child, sometimes an elementary age child with a younger sibling in a stroller (I am sure the few, very few, two children families that I saw are a result of the relaxing of the one child policy within the last few years).   As I biked to the copy store, children were being posed in front of doors with the Peking University (PKU) logo on it. Posed, so that they looked like they were holding the logo in their hands. Parents pointing out locations, and talking togethe...

Golden Week

Golden Week There are two legal Golden Weeks in China. One happens in January or February for Chinese New Year. The other week is around October 1, and is National Day, in other words, the founding of China.   It gives people a whole week of vacation, partially so they can make the long trip to their homes. (This is a HUGE country, and even with very good public transport, getting “home” can easily take many, many days.) It does not really hit right for university students. School started for us only 2 weeks ago. Why would you go home after only arriving 2 weeks ago? It also is complicated by Moon Festival a week or so before October 1. (For me, it meant that my Monday classes had one class and then 2 weeks off. …..but I gave them assignments anyway and had them email me their essays. )   There are certainly fewer people on the streets. I don’t see shops closed like they are for Chinese New Year, but there are some which open late, etc.    I am checking the 150 e...