Dear all, it has been some moments since I last posted an entry for this blog. So many things have happened, I’m almost lost for words. Almost :)
It seems like our seminars have only just finished and already the next one is looming, God willing, larger than life. There is catering to organise, contacts to contact, newspaper advertisements to place and studies to prepare. In the middle of these things, we are struggling to maintain some sort of spiritual development programme for our own lives. It is so very easy to be lost in the practicalities of preparations. It is even possible to prepare our first principle subjects without developing our spiritual understanding of the scriptures and more particularly the application of them in our lives.
Heb 6:1 Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God, Of the doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment.
Explaining the resurrection of the dead just one more time over a two hour period without an interpreter can be a slow and tiring process. I can see why the gift of languages was so useful to the preachers of the gospel in Paul’s time. But the relevant point is that for our own lives in Christ to develop, we must learn greater lessons through seeking the meat of the Word (assuming of course, we are not the ones in need of milk).
The constant activity with the addition of the ‘Fog of infants’, by which I mean the difficulty in being rational and Christlike that seems to come with having your sleep interrupted every morning at 3am, means that it is easy to miss the greatest lessons of all.
Maybe, I am in the process of discovering ‘patience’. It’s not a moment too soon. J
By God’s good grace, I will return to you a better person than when I left.
But now, let me tell you about my stinky baby.
I have a stinky baby. Well, he smells like a baby to me, but many Khmer, when they take the baby from my arms pull him close and sniff his head. The ‘Khmer second’ is the time taken between the initial sniff and their eyes rolling back in their heads and recoiling into a dead faint. We have been asked on a couple of occasions, quite surreptitiously, how often we bathe our baby. Our usual reply was ‘once a day’. The looks of horror we saw displayed, have since convinced me that we have transgressed some all important royal edict on the bathing of infants. It turns out, that bathing your child less than three times a day, amounts to gross negligence in baby hygiene. No doubt the rumour going around is that the white baby down the road is cute as a button, but you need to wear a gas mask to avoid the hideous stench that comes from his parent’s ‘foul’ and ‘dirty’ habits. Spurred into action, we’ve stepped it up a notch. He gets two baths a day. So, he’s stinky, but not as much as before. That having been said, we can see the value in more frequent baths as the world turns. It will begin to get hotter and hotter here and he is already having some difficulties with heat rash now. We’re using ointments and prickly powder now which leaves him smelling as noxious as a tub of Tiger Balm.
Over the strains of Tallis’ second set of lamentations, I can hear my baby bewailing the fact hat we have not yet realised that he only needs one sleep a day. Pardon me, while I attend to him once more.
‘So much for his afternoon nap’, I say. He’s lying there in the dark smiling, gurgling and then crying when he loses his dummy and gets stuck at the bottom of the cot facing the wrong way. In developmental news, when on the mat, his creeping is going well and I think he may skip crawling altogether. He loves to pull himself up on things. He’s developed a special cry which means
‘Assist me, designated parental units! I have scaled this object and through no fault of my own, placed myself in a precarious position. I know not whether to retreat or forge ahead. Assist me with great haste, I say, unless you want sleep to be something that only happens to other people!’
I am glad to report a sudden increase in the speed of our internet. I was becoming quite frustrated with the quality of the internet speeds we were hitherto experiencing. Maybe it was my imagination, but they could have been quite unfavourably compared to ‘continental shift.’ But now, all things have changed (except perhaps our ftp and http large file download speeds) and I can post again without fear of 100% loss of all material.
I have to ask the question, how long can this good fortune last? How long before I’m better off taking my outgoing emails to the ISP HQ on a USB key.
I would like to speak briefly about a rather strange phenomenon. Christmas music is very popular here in day to day activities. It is not unusual in our street to see a small blue utility backing up towards it’s intended target to the strains of ‘jingle bells’, or hear someone’s phone start ringing to the tune of some Christmas ditty which is only heard in Australia in the shopping centres from the immaculately groomed girls from the talent schools holding a tape recorder in one hand and wearing a little red and green elf costume. In fact, I was most bemused on my arrival in Cambodia to be subjected to Air Asia’s in flight entertainment which consisted of a Hammond organ playing up beat Christmas tunes. It was the 4th of January.
I think there are plenty of other things to talk about, but I’m a little tired, so I might sign off now.
Love to all those back home and to the Brothers and Sisters everywhere.
It seems like our seminars have only just finished and already the next one is looming, God willing, larger than life. There is catering to organise, contacts to contact, newspaper advertisements to place and studies to prepare. In the middle of these things, we are struggling to maintain some sort of spiritual development programme for our own lives. It is so very easy to be lost in the practicalities of preparations. It is even possible to prepare our first principle subjects without developing our spiritual understanding of the scriptures and more particularly the application of them in our lives.Heb 6:1 Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith toward God, Of the doctrine of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead, and of eternal judgment.
Explaining the resurrection of the dead just one more time over a two hour period without an interpreter can be a slow and tiring process. I can see why the gift of languages was so useful to the preachers of the gospel in Paul’s time. But the relevant point is that for our own lives in Christ to develop, we must learn greater lessons through seeking the meat of the Word (assuming of course, we are not the ones in need of milk).
The constant activity with the addition of the ‘Fog of infants’, by which I mean the difficulty in being rational and Christlike that seems to come with having your sleep interrupted every morning at 3am, means that it is easy to miss the greatest lessons of all.
Maybe, I am in the process of discovering ‘patience’. It’s not a moment too soon. J
By God’s good grace, I will return to you a better person than when I left.
But now, let me tell you about my stinky baby.
I have a stinky baby. Well, he smells like a baby to me, but many Khmer, when they take the baby from my arms pull him close and sniff his head. The ‘Khmer second’ is the time taken between the initial sniff and their eyes rolling back in their heads and recoiling into a dead faint. We have been asked on a couple of occasions, quite surreptitiously, how often we bathe our baby. Our usual reply was ‘once a day’. The looks of horror we saw displayed, have since convinced me that we have transgressed some all important royal edict on the bathing of infants. It turns out, that bathing your child less than three times a day, amounts to gross negligence in baby hygiene. No doubt the rumour going around is that the white baby down the road is cute as a button, but you need to wear a gas mask to avoid the hideous stench that comes from his parent’s ‘foul’ and ‘dirty’ habits. Spurred into action, we’ve stepped it up a notch. He gets two baths a day. So, he’s stinky, but not as much as before. That having been said, we can see the value in more frequent baths as the world turns. It will begin to get hotter and hotter here and he is already having some difficulties with heat rash now. We’re using ointments and prickly powder now which leaves him smelling as noxious as a tub of Tiger Balm.Over the strains of Tallis’ second set of lamentations, I can hear my baby bewailing the fact hat we have not yet realised that he only needs one sleep a day. Pardon me, while I attend to him once more.
‘So much for his afternoon nap’, I say. He’s lying there in the dark smiling, gurgling and then crying when he loses his dummy and gets stuck at the bottom of the cot facing the wrong way. In developmental news, when on the mat, his creeping is going well and I think he may skip crawling altogether. He loves to pull himself up on things. He’s developed a special cry which means
‘Assist me, designated parental units! I have scaled this object and through no fault of my own, placed myself in a precarious position. I know not whether to retreat or forge ahead. Assist me with great haste, I say, unless you want sleep to be something that only happens to other people!’
I am glad to report a sudden increase in the speed of our internet. I was becoming quite frustrated with the quality of the internet speeds we were hitherto experiencing. Maybe it was my imagination, but they could have been quite unfavourably compared to ‘continental shift.’ But now, all things have changed (except perhaps our ftp and http large file download speeds) and I can post again without fear of 100% loss of all material.
I have to ask the question, how long can this good fortune last? How long before I’m better off taking my outgoing emails to the ISP HQ on a USB key.
I would like to speak briefly about a rather strange phenomenon. Christmas music is very popular here in day to day activities. It is not unusual in our street to see a small blue utility backing up towards it’s intended target to the strains of ‘jingle bells’, or hear someone’s phone start ringing to the tune of some Christmas ditty which is only heard in Australia in the shopping centres from the immaculately groomed girls from the talent schools holding a tape recorder in one hand and wearing a little red and green elf costume. In fact, I was most bemused on my arrival in Cambodia to be subjected to Air Asia’s in flight entertainment which consisted of a Hammond organ playing up beat Christmas tunes. It was the 4th of January.
I think there are plenty of other things to talk about, but I’m a little tired, so I might sign off now.
Love to all those back home and to the Brothers and Sisters everywhere.
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