Chinese New Year 2012

For the first time we had two more for Chinese New Year. My second brother brought his wife and my first brother brought his fiance!



My brother was in Taichung to attend a church event, so he and his fiance rode back down with my other brother and his wife on Tuesday, and they all got in at 1 AM. We did not open gifts that night!


My second brother and his wife.



My first brother and his fiance.



They had announced their engagement a few days before.


Chinese New Year

Chinese Lunar New Year is not a fixed date on the solar calendar and can come any time from January through March. (This year it came on January 23).

It's not a private little holiday for the immediate family but like Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one. All the married sons and their families travel home to make the family circle complete again.

By nightfall on Chinese New Year's Eve, all businesses have shut down, the streets are empty, and everybody is home at the big family reunion dinner, prepared to stay up all night celebrating. They do not give gifts but the young people especially get red envelopes of cash.

The next day is the first of the lunar new year. The department stores will probably be open to get everybody's Red Envelope cash, but most other types of businesses will stay closed.

The second day of the lunar new year is when all married daughters and their families return home to see their parents, further congesting the roads with travelers.

On a bad year the Chinese New Year falls on a Thursday and everybody has to go back to work on Monday, with only four days off. This was a very good year with Chinese New Year falling on a Monday and giving most people nine days off!


The Next Day


showing old family photos





Showing my little sister how to play her recorder.



Eating spaghetti.






By late afternoon we were finally ready to open presents and they told me to pass out the gifts. It was my first time to be in charge of that and I hadn't known it was so fun keeping track of who was ready for their next gift and timing them to the situation.














The Next Day



My sister-in-law's sister came down to pick up a homeless cat for a friend and dropped in to see us that morning.











My father doing what he loves best, talking Bible.

Babysitting

I agreed to babysit the cherub because his parents said I didn't have to teach him anything, they just wanted him to have exposure to the English spoken in our family. I had visions of reading him all my Narnia books.

The cherub had his own ideas. Being three, he does not read and he sees life as The World According to Cherub.

When he first walked in the door he screamed if you even looked at him. Eardrum-piercing shrieks that left your ear sort of silent for a second. If you were lucky he wouldn't throw himself to the floor and start trying to inflict brain damage.

About the second day, I decided not only to buy ear plugs but I also decided no more. The instant he shrieked I whisked him over to a deep armchair and waited him out, sending his mom out of sight so he wouldn't keep screaming just for her benefit. I did not care how long he screamed. Holding him in the chair was the most restful part of the class.

I was doing this because in the Chinese culture they fully expect the teacher to train the child and make the child behave, they figure that's why he goes to school, so I have to constantly fight my instinct to keep my hands off and defer to the mother, waiting for her to take care of it.

I had also seen Sister Wang do something like this with her grandson. He had been fed, burped, changed and was screaming in anger at his nap. Sister Wang just kept him on her shoulder peacefully patting his back and saying, "Pa zhe, pa zhe". Every time he pushed away screaming, she would cluck at him sympathetically, telling him what a great singing voice he would have, and putting him back on her shoulder over and over ... FOR 2 HOURS.

Halfway through it was starting to get to his dad, who got up to take his son, but Sister Wang airily waved her son-in-law away, saying if you stopped the process in the middle he would never learn. Her daughter and son-in-law went out somewhere soon after that. Meanwhile the baby eventually tired himself out and took the nap.

Sister Wang told me she had done that with all her kids so that when she needed a free hand, all she had to say was "Pa zhe" and they would curl up and sleep and she wouldn't have to worry about them for that moment.

Anyway, back to the cherub. He peed the chair but I ignored it. When he had tired himself out after 15 minutes and was silent I let him out of the chair. It only took a few times before he would calm down real fast (to get his mother back in the room!) and even suck his thumb contentedly in peace, like he appreciated the time to sort things out in his mind and try being good again. (He even stopped peeing the chair after a few days because it wasn't going to get him out of there any faster.)

I admire energetic children. I have seen people who get nervous with children in the house. That is not me. When the cherub tries to talk to me I listen to him intently, all shiny-eyed at his potential. Even when I was holding him in the chair and letting him scream it out, I was keeping up a steady stream of soft patter about the way all this would make him a stronger, more helpful grown-up in the future, and the great things he would go on to accomplish with his energy.

He also had a habit of smacking himself in the head every time he wanted to get attention or get something because then an adult would rush over offering whatever they could to get him to stop hitting himself, and I stopped that real fast too by putting him in the chair a couple times, and not letting him hit himself while in time-out. I didn't want him growing up to be a cutter.

However, a few weeks later I was dreading the class one morning because it wasn't going to be held at home or in a park but in a nearby department store for the first time.

I had tried to get away from chasing the cherub aimlessly around our house (to his credit he loves helping me "wash dishes" and put vegetables in the juicer, I believe in including little ones in everything even if it takes twice as long ... it saves time further on!) and now I would be chasing him around from aisle to aisle trying vainly to get him to repeat the names of the items on the shelves ... and the first time he threw that first testing tantrum in a new environment where was I going to let him scream it out?

At first the cherub's mom and I did follow him through the aisles. He got one of the wheeled suitcases on display to drag through the store and his mom told me they'd said it was OK for him to do that. Well, if his mom and the store people had said it was OK what could I do? I just made sure he didn't bump into stuff or people.

Up to that point the class was fairly easy because we were walking and I was doing something nice and logical like having his mom repeat in English everything she wanted to tell him or me and putting it in the tape recorder. But when I saw his mom trying to look at stuff on the fly and herded him toward her, he got irritated and screamed.

I immediately strode off with the piece of luggage and put it back in its place on the other side of the store. He never screamed again.

But see, he knows from experience I mean business. I do not keep promising him more and more stuff to get him to stop screaming. No, I take more and more stuff away, and if he screams about that I put him in a chair.

His mom took him to get a shopping cart telling me it made him go slower and he wouldn't run. The sight of him with the cart made things start clicking in my brain. Children are supposed to follow their parents through the store!

I kept my hand on the cart and made him follow his mom wherever she wanted to go, whatever she wanted to look at, except when she didn't know what she wanted to look at and followed him. But as we were watching his mom look at slippers it was suddenly clear-cut in my brain. What if he was my little kid and she was a friend I was going shopping with ... how would I make a son of mine behave? how had I made my baby sister behave when she was little? ... and then it was a lot more obvious how to react to anything he did.

There were still some moments when she had the cart and I had to keep him from running on ahead, my hand ready to grab his jacket, since she thought it was OK for him to wander freely without holding her hand.

I told her I know she wants him to get exercise but any time I was with them he was going to have to hold somebody's hand in the store. As I told my mom later, if you have to constantly worry about your kid breaking into a run and leaving you in the store, then he's too young to be walking about without his hand held. Now he seems to love holding my hand everywhere.

There were some more episodes in the food court when the cherub finished eating before his mom and got up to wander around. I put him back in his chair, with expected results, and I did not care how many people in the food court stared at us. But he was a lot nicer the next time we went out.

He wants to be good and he needs consistent boundaries to base his decisions on, and I want his mom to enjoy taking him many places in life.

How I kicked the flu in 1998 and last week.

In 1998 I was back in the States after 8 years away. Everybody at my aunt's house came down with the flu in turn except for me.

Somewhere I had read about Sacagawea, the Indian guide for Lewis and Clark, drinking a pint of oil to stave off sickness. (I could not find a trace of this anecdote when I looked it up on the web for this post.)

My aunt was cooking Spanish Rice that night and I persuaded her to leave in all the chicken skins because

1. The oil from chicken skins in chicken soup supposedly kills germs.
2. Nobody wants their chicken skins?! I will totally eat them for you.

That night I peeled and ate garlic after garlic with the chicken skins and rice.

In the middle of the night I woke up feeling royally indigested but I refused to get up and went back to sleep.

I was fine in the morning. My mom and sister were throwing up and my cousin would soon be incapacitated in agony, but I never came down with the flu.

Fast forward to last week.

The first we knew my sister was sick was when she started gagging over supper and ran to the bathroom but couldn't even throw up. She just sat on the sofa with a fever and tears running down her cheeks. I just held her and hugged her and kept giving her as many good things to sip as I could think of, a big dose of C, as high as I could safely give her of A, grapefruit seed extract in a cup of water, strong hot ginger tea, etc., and she was all well 2 days later.

It was the afternoon of that third day when I felt the distinct stirrings of nausea. I got to a stopping point on my laptop and took 2000 mg of C before I remembered I had to get some activated charcoal down me first.

If you've never heard of activated charcoal it's a backup that hospitals will give you for food poisoning if for some reason they can't pump your stomach. 2 decades ago my dad ate something bad and came racing home in a taxi with diarrhea. He took charcoal and then went right back to town that day.

I knew I really shouldn't take them together, the charcoal might try to absorb the C and the C might ruin the efficacy of the charcoal but I didn't want to go into this without charcoal.

20 minutes later the nausea was still there and had ratcheted up a notch. I imagined my forehead felt warmer than normal.

I peeled 2 garlic and ate the slices in between typing. When the garlic got too hot, I sliced 2 more garlic and swallowed them down like vitamin pills with a couple of glasses of water, trying to crush them a bit first with my teeth on the way. The nausea went away.

An hour or so later the nausea came back and I washed two more garlic down with water. Again the nausea went away.

At supper I was really hungry and knew it was my last chance to nip the flu in the bud if I didn't want to be throwing up my supper. I remembered my 1998 experience. I had no chicken skins but I had olive oil.

So I took about 5 tablespoons of leftover spaghetti-sauce-ground-beef-macaroni, poured 3 tablespoons of olive oil over it, some liberal pinches of salt, and 4 HEAPING tablespoons of some Parmesan cheese we had just got in the house for New Year's. I love me a little spaghetti with my Parmesan cheese, oil and salt ... it was scrumptious! Why hadn't I been doing this when I wasn't sick? Every bowl of food must taste better swimming in olive oil, Parmesan and salt.

It was so delicious I had two more bowls just like it, eating a clove of garlic with each bite, and then I finished it off with some fresh-ground hot coffee to make sure my stomach acids kicked in and digested the food before my body decided to be sick.

The nausea never came back!!! Not that night nor the next day.

I can only guess what my breath smelled like for Bible Class later but I was happily full and slept well all night, my forehead back to normal.

That was a total of about 15 cloves of garlic and almost 9 T of olive oil.

Sunday Photos

Ling's mom became a christian recently.



Tracy is that person who leaves the trail and comes back with something to cook. Here she picked some greens from somewhere outside our house for another sister after services.



Christine and her husband do the church bulletin every week. Here they are on the right. I teach their 3 beautiful children - a bookworm and two twins.



My mom and dad.



Joyce invited Tracy out to eat on her birthday. Ling and her mom, Jared, Candi and I went too.

This was a hot pot restaurant. Beside each table is a small gas tank on the floor hooked up to the burners:









Walking back after lunch.



Afternoon coffee in a tea cup.



Tracy and I went to the market so she could fix soup for supper. She seldom gets to cook at home.




I shot this video because even though I'm used to seeing live fish on the table (as kids my brother and I would stand at the fish stall waiting to see if one would flop off the table) this was the first time I was horrified to see live fish with their tails tied up to their mouths (just barely seen in the video) still breathing.



Tom Yam Soup



Tracy won.

Jesus Lover, Christian - What's in a name?

We met an American at a wedding feast last week. I think his name was Jim. The music was so loud we were shouting back and forth across the table and even then we sometimes had to shout the same thing 3 or 4 times before being understood, or not.

Jim said he likes to call himself a Jesus Lover and not call himself by the name of a particular group. After all if the important thing is accepting Jesus as Lord, why would you call yourself by the name of a particular group?

Here are things I wish I could have thrown into the conversation to ask him about:

*** Do you think accepting Jesus as Lord includes obeying his commandment to be immersed into him?

For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. (Galatians 3:27)

Would you say that you are not in Christ until you are immersed into him?

*** You prefer the term "Jesus Lover" to an unnecessarily divisive name like Baptist, or Methodist. That is a very Biblical concept:

Now I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment. For I have been informed concerning you, my brethren, by Chloe's people, that there are quarrels among you. Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, "I am of Paul," and "I of Apollos," and "I of Cephas," and "I of Christ." Has Christ been divided? (1 Corinthians 1:10-13b)

However, would you consider using the term "Christian" since that, at least, is in the Bible?

but if anyone suffers as a Christian, he is not to be ashamed, but is to glorify God in this name. (1 Peter 4:16)

According to this verse it would seem God specifically wants us to use the term "Christian" to glorify him.

If the term "Christian" is in the Bible, but the term "Baptist" is not, then wouldn't making up the term "Jesus Lover" which is also not in the Bible be more akin to using the term "Baptist" than using the term "Christian"?

Shouldn't we do Bible things in Bible ways and call Bible things by Bible names?

It would have been good to hear what he had to say. It would have been fun to talk about all kinds of things to do with the Bible. Meanwhile I really appreciate him for bringing up something as interesting as the Bible to talk about and not the weather.

Jim, in case you ever see this post, here's a guy who also doesn't think we should be doing anything but what is in the Bible.

Roger Campbell Gospel Meeting Trip - Day 4

Saturday, 12 March 2011 (Day 4 of 6)

Tracy and I got on the train the next day and met up with Sister Wang, Dorcas, Jane3, Bing Bing and Blanchard; all of us taking the train with Roger Campbell to Taichung, the next city where he was scheduled to preach - all different sermons, too.

The preacher's home in Taichung, John and Michelle Yo's apartment, where we've stayed many times before:



The guys getting ready to go play basketball with my brother. Back when he was 11, the preacher's son Ben (far left) stayed with us for a year when he had to go to school in Kaohsiung. He is such a happy-go-lucky sweet kid all our neighbors loved him too:



Joyce (far right) arrived from Kaohsiung - this was the first chance her college schedule had allowed her to attend the gospel meetings:



Sister Wang. So many interesting discussions have happened at this table:



Brother Yo and Tracy talking with Joyce:



That night, I think most of the young people hung on Brother Campbell's lesson, "Love Before Marriage 婚前的愛", and he certainly got some questions afterward. All in Chinese: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, or you can click on the videos below:



Having fun singing in English after the meeting:





Related posts:

Roger Campbell Gospel Meeting Trip - Day 1
Roger Campbell Gospel Meeting Trip - Day 2
Roger Campbell Gospel Meeting Trip - Day 3
Roger Campbell Gospel Meeting Trip - Day 4: You are here

Roger Campbell Gospel Meeting Trip - Day 3

Friday, 11 March 2011 (Day 3 of 6)

We went to one of the nursing homes in the morning. While the men went off to study Bible with some of the other residents, Sister Wang and the others stood ready with blowdryers as the ladies came out of the shower and I was able to help with getting their socks on their feet, which was surprisingly quite a workout. Later, I was glad to sink my teeth into one of the sweet black sesame pastries Sister Wen-Yi had brought.

At lunch afterward - my brother and the Wangs:



Brother and Sister Wang and Tracy:



Brother Zao:



You can just barely glimpse Justine in this next photo. I have so few pictures of her because we were always sitting together as I shot the scene in front of me. The few photos I have of her do not capture her kind happy spirits and lively banter whenever we got together:



Roger Campbell, and the Zao's who made it all possible - lunch was their treat - and I wanted the recipe of a particularly memorable seafood soup with Chinese sauerkraut in it:



Justine had to catch the train home to Taipei right after lunch and there was a mad rush when she found out she had mixed up her backpack with someone else's.

Roger Campbell before he came had said to schedule as many Bible studies for him as possible because he could always rest in heaven:



The time on that photo reads 1:48 PM Taiwan Time (2:48 PM Japan Time, since they're an hour ahead). We had no idea it was just 2 minutes after Japan's worst earthquake in 100-300 years, causing a 33 foot tsunami traveling over 6 miles inland, taking out at least one of Japan's towns and starting a chain of events that would decimate their economy and leave us with radiation fallout all around the globe by the next month.



Wen Yi's mother and father, her brother and his family, and her sister and her family all worship with us down in Kaohsiung. They had all recently left their respective denominations after one of them found the booklet "The Church of the Bible" in a train station the year before and began discussing it with Brother Wang and my dad, and asking questions of their various denominational leaders.

Wen-Yi still had things she wanted to discuss, and since Roger Campbell and his "What does the Bible say?" logic was there, she wanted to pick his brain:



My brain was taking a short break after lunch so I didn't think to video the Bible Study until we were halfway into it. Thankfully Tracy got some of it on both her camera and mine:











Here's where Tracy started shooting with my camera. She wasn't familiar with the microphone placement on my camera and accidentally covered it from time to time. Thankfully, my camera has supersensitive audio, and the words can still be heard, though not with crystal clarity.

Sorry for the video quality. I was shooting on the lowest setting (320x240) to eke the most time out of my 8G camera card, and it was still blurry from "fixing" the lens after a smash.











Pei-Rong, on the left, came with Wen-Yi out of the denomination and had just been immersed the week before. Tracy and I were staying at her house.



By this time I think the Wangs had started getting calls from friends all over Taiwan telling about the earthquake in Japan and warning them that the news said there was a tsunami headed straight for us in Hualien, due at 5:30 PM. The trains on the east coast had been stopped and the schools let out early. (The train Justine was on would have already left the coast.)

The Wangs continued talking for a while and then we had a prayer. They turned on the TV for a bit. I called my mom and and transferred my photos to my laptop, freeing up my camera card to either film our last moments or the sermon that night.

The Wangs decided to go ahead with the gospel meeting, set for 7 PM that night, and took us back to the church building to continue getting ready for it.

I was wondering why we weren't high-tailing it up the mountains ringing Hualien or at least planning to greet 5:30 PM from the roof of the church building, 5 floors up, but Sister Wang still had obligations, children to help take home from school, and they'd had so many false alarms in the past 30 years. They also felt here was Roger Campbell working so diligently for God, and God had opened up so many doors for them in the past few weeks, they would just trust him about the tsunami and if it came, well, we'd either be around to help with the aftermath or just get to heaven that much sooner.

If we had gone to the mountains, traffic jams would have kept us from getting back in time for the gospel meeting. I figured if God had provided me with a five story building, the least I could do was be on its roof. So, at 5:30 that's where I was, looking down at a steady stream of cars all headed toward the mountains. The opposite lane was empty of traffic.

Standing in the drizzling twilight and seeing nothing but concrete buildings as far as I could see, I felt we were too far from shore for anything like the 10 foot wave I imagined the Indonesian tsunami of 2004 to have been. (This was before I got home a few days later, saw the videos on youtube, and found out the tsunami in Japan had been a 33 foot wave sweeping at least 6 miles - 10 km - inland. When I located the Hualien church building on Google Maps it was only about 3 km from shore.)

Down below, Brother Wang, Roger Campbell, and my brother, were in the neighborhood passing out fliers for the gospel meeting, and after a while to make sure nothing was going to happen, I went down.

It turned out Taiwan was in a sweet spot and the tsunami rolled in on the north coast only a few inches high, though it caused a lot of damage in Hawaii and reached South America.

Roger Campbell preached that night on "The Worship of the Church". If you have only a few minutes, at least listen to the 4th one to whet your appetite; it's only 2 minutes and 44 seconds long. (In Chinese.)

Clicking on any of the photos will open that video in a new tab:



That night after class we drank tea at the Wangs, enjoying fellowship and Brother Campbell's dry flashing humor. We left at midnight but Tracy fondly remembers staying up till 2 AM on Roger Campbell's prior visits.

Related posts:

Roger Campbell Gospel Meeting Trip - Day 1
Roger Campbell Gospel Meeting Trip - Day 2
Roger Campbell Gospel Meeting Trip - Day 3: You are here
Roger Campbell Gospel Meeting Trip - Day 4