Wednesday July 18
Fewer of us are getting to breakfast this morning when it starts, an indication we are getting tired and running less of adrenaline but also less jet lagged. Praise God no one has gotten sick (yet). After a breakfast of fried eggs on Chun-Yu-Ping, Chinese tortillas, we arrived to begin our third day of teaching on American holidays - today's lesson being on Christmas. During assembly, our combined team sang "Do Lord" and Charmaine shared her testimony on how she found the living God by seeing her grandmother rejoicing though suffering with nasal cancer and still living though the doctors said she should have died six years ago. Elder Albert continued his message on "life is a miracle", reminding the kids that the fact they ask "why", that sense of curiosity, is a miracle and makes us human above the rest of the animals. We then dispersed to teach the three sessions on Christmas, including doing a gift exchange (the children all had to bring a small gift to exchange). One teacher observing the class said it looked like so much fun she wanted to join in too. During our debriefing, we all noted that the students are connecting much better and responding well and on the other hand, we are learning what works well with the particular group of students we have (such as more physical activities with one class or breaking the class size into even smaller cells instead of lecturing to 15 kids at once). We also noted who among us are more naturally gifted as teachers and who are not, a valuable lesson which can help them choose future careers.
After lunch, we returned to our cool church to change out of our Vision T-for teacher-shirts and spent an hour and half preparing for tomorrow's vital lesson on Easter and the way of salvation. The hour of decision (to borrow Billy Graham's famous program title) will be around 8 PM PDT Wednesday, so pray especially for this. We then went to a Haka tea shop to understand where this custom came from and drink the tea we personally freshly grounded. After this, we went to the cool springs recreation area, where we spent about an hour beside a waterfall stream wading among the water and rocks. The cool spring wasn't particularly cold, more like tepid 80 degree F temperature. We were then treated by Elder Albert to a multi course authentic Haka dinner at a nearby restaurant, many of us tasting dishes we never tried before. We returned to the church around 7:30 to do our group devotions (on God calling Ananias in Acts 9) and debrief the day, quiting earlier so hopefully we can have a longer time to rest for tomorrow is a kairos moment day
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