I was beginning a trip of a life time. And looking back, it was.
There were a lot of things about that trip that were hard. And the biggest was the people that I was with. I had no peers, or friends on this trip, and that was just hard. Joleen was fun at times, but she wasn’t my friend. Luke was crazy, but he and I only got a long about half the time. Happy and I butted heads, and didn’t respect eachother, I felt like I was being babysat by Tom and Yolanda. The diner wasn’t work that I wanted to do, and I had a lot of growing to do.
But there are things that I remember, that make me miss that trip. Pestering the interns and learning how to read chinese – entrance, exit, adult, giant, little, heart, golden. Making friends with people that I still miss – Jessica, Diana, Angie, Fiona and her kids.
I miss being out and being on my own there – picking up the passport pictures, riding the bike with Luke to the Jom-bai, seeing where the sidewalk ends, riding back from the university alone on a bus full of chinese, taking pictures outside in the dark. I miss going shopping at the Jom-bai, the bus rides to see the sites, daily taxi rides, buying a bike with no translator.
I miss the food. The strange diet of chinese for breakfast – Chicken intestines, wonderful noodles, steamed buns, baconian, and other things that I loved.
The strange diet of lunch and dinner at the diner – a mixture of hamburgers and hawaiian food, with chinese ingredients. Cause nothing was the same there – the beef is too lean so you have to mix pork in with it, and other little things.
I miss the connection I had back home due to the fact that these people where from the same island as my good friend.
I miss the things we did – some how finding shopping carts and carrying both our bikes and two giant benches over a mile of ups and downs and sides. I miss the fact that I cut down a tree with a meat cleaver because there are apparently neither axes nor shovels in china.
I miss the writing. I miss the sadness and homesickness and the tiredness that I wrote from and how it made me write. I had some of my best writing there – telling of my emotions, the customs, and just my day to a broad audience that was interested to hear what I was saying.
I miss the time I had with God there. I miss that for once in my life I was having dreams of things that were going on, because there was nothing there to hinder me and His time. I miss that I was walking and claiming land in my footsteps. I miss reading my bible, and listening to Misty Edwards while I did exercising in the mornings. I miss the purpose that was in my life at that point.
I just miss China.
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Gosh.
how things have changed in a year…
indeed. i feel like God is remaking all of us right now.
Was that really only a year ago? It sounds like a trip to remember, in many ways.
“The times they are a changin’ “
Can I truly say I understand? I am planning a post for the 20th which will be a year from when I left. Once you go you never come back, some part of you never comes back. No one understands, not even the people who understand understand. I don’t know what China is like. I don’t know what it is like to be alone on a packed public transit or to buy a bike. I know the emotions of all these things but I do not have the same imagery. There is an ache and a longing that will never go away. Not until we are truly home.
Hi!
so how r u lately?