More Updates!

We had a team from South Dakota come, as I told you in the previous post.

It was pretty much awesome!  I am so thankful that they came!  They brought me some treats from America, and they brought energy to the entire team!  They also brought enthusiasm and vigor to share the Gospel with our students!  It was wonderful!!  I thank God that He allowed for them to visit us!

For unexplained reasons, we ended up accidentally cancelling class on the day that they visited, which worked out PERFECTLY!  We invited our students and friends to join us for a potluck.  So instead of having class, we were able to free talk, and the Gospel was shared!  We had students bring American food (Pizza hut!) and some homemade Chinese food as well, so we had a wonderful mix!

After that, we had our free class, where they shared about the individuality of snowflakes, and how God created each one, just like he created each one of us individually and different!  What a blessing to hear that! We also talked about how we are all sinners, but we are washed clean through Christ! After that night, I had a good friend of mine (who is not Christian) come up to me and tell me that he now knows that he is a sinner. He didn't profess faith, or regret for the sins, but he now knows.  That is a REALLY big step for someone.  In Chinese, the word for sin is also the word for crime.  People often feel that sin isn't a part of their lives, because they follow the law.  When people realize that they do things that are wrong, and that God knows that, it is such a huge step, and I thank God for that realization.  I just pray that He would allow us to be able to have the words to say to witness to this man, and to tell him that yes, he is a sinner, but God forgives those sins of all who ask for forgiveness.

I don't have any pictures from my camera, but once I get some, I will post them here or in another post.

Right now I am working on editing the bilingual bulletin.  Being human, I made some mistakes (typos), and I have to go through and fix them.  I'm making a master, and then hopefully tomorrow or Sunday I will have some help fixing all 20 of them!  There are too many things to add (like page numbers) that it would take me WAY too long to do on my own!  So I now thank God for community! :)

Chinese New Year is starting this weekend.  Most of our students will be gone visiting their families.  I still have another 5 days at home in Macau, and then I will travel to visit an indirect coworker of mine living about 2 hours away by plane.  I am so excited to visit a new place in Asia!  I haven't really traveled, outside of going to Hong Kong and Jiangmen (for work), and Thailand for 3 days (for a friend's wedding).  This will be my first refreshing vacation, and I am stoked! :)  Tonight I will go to pick up my ferry ticket to the HK airport, and on Wednesday I will take off! :)

We also had a new teacher join us.  He's not new to the area, but he's new to Macau as of today!  He taught in mainland for a year, in Hong Kong for 3 months, and now he will (God willing!) be here for almost 2 years!  That is exciting news! :)

I think that's all I have for today.  I pray that you all enjoy your time, and that you are able to recognize the blessings that God is giving you today and every day!

Apple pie!!

Today I got to make 2 apple pies!! Tomorrow we have some Americans coming to visit, so naturally we will have a party!! I made some apple pie to share at said party with my students and the Americans. Yeah!! I am thankful for my grandma and the recipes that she has passed down to me so I can share some wonderful food with my friends!!

Take a look around!

In case you haven't done so, I want to let you know that there are a few pages on my blog besides each individual post.  Right above this post you'll see a dark gray bar with a few links.  Feel free to click on them to see my testimony, my reason for being a missionary, information about LCMS International, and more.

In other news...

Friday marks a day I've been looking forward to.  No, not Groundhog's Day Eve, though that day will be quite exciting too.  I am excited to have members of the South Dakota team to Hong Kong come to Macau to see me, and to help with the Bible Study!  The team comes from a church that has been supporting me, and I am thoroughly excited to see them again!  I hope that they are excited to come to Macau, as their trip to Hong Kong is near its completion!

I'm also excited to Skype with an elementary school class to teach them a little about being a missionary!

If you have a group who wants to take a short-term mission trip to Macau, or make the virtual trip via Skype, please get in contact with me and I can either help you myself or get you in contact with the right person, depending!

It's 2am, though, and I have spent too much time putzing around my blog (and I admit: Facebook!) tonight.  It's time to get some sleep!

Temptation of Jesus

Today we are discussing the temptation of Jesus in Bible Study.  Since I have the young kids, I am not sure how brave I will be: one of the lesson plans that I have suggests to put a tray of food together: chocolates/candies in the middle with fruit on the outside.  Tell the students that they can only take a piece of fruit: no chocolate.  Then, I turn my back for a few minutes, and see what happens.

This would then lead into talking about temptation and what it is, which would lead into talking about how Jesus responded to temptation.

The English Children's Bible and our library of CPH books both do not include the temptation of Jesus, but the Chinese Children's Bible that I have does.  I will try to record a friend reading it so that I can play it for the kids to hear.  And I can pretend that I am reading ;) Sorry, the photo is turned sideways.

The basic idea is to get across that Jesus is true God, but also true man, and he was tempted to sin just like we are.  The difference is that He always chose to not succumb to sin.  He gave us some examples of how to say NO to temptation.  Hopefully that message will come across tonight!

Funny Moments

So.  Something that I have always found amazing is pronunciation.  Usually it's funny when English words are pronounced in ways which are incomprehensible, or sound like another word.  For instance, last night in my class, I had a student say the word 'harmful', but I would have told you with all confidence that she was saying a Chinese word.  I had no idea!  But it got cleared up later.

The one that I find most interesting, however, is when the Cantonese speakers read English articles with Mandarin words written out in PinYin: for example the name of the new president of China. They cannot pronounce it, so I then pronounce it in Mandarin, and they say, "OH!! Ohh, I know!"

PinYin isn't easy for all Chinese people to read, since they don't use it all of the time: they just know what sound each characters represent.  I just find it interesting that sometimes I have to explain the Chinese words to the Chinese people ;)

What's a funny story from your job?

Pronunciation!

I would like to share a funny moment with you.

I have a student who is studying to be a lawyer.  In our class, we had a debate on terrorism, and whether or not torture should be legal for those suspected of terrorism.  We both had a great laugh when we realized how close 'terrorist' and 'tourist' sound!  Let's make sure not to torture the tourists! ;)

I hope this made you smile as it made me smile!

Some other smiles from the past week include meeting up with another ministry in Macau for hot pot, visiting the baby orphanage with students to promote awareness and volunteer opportunities, going out for late night snacks with some students/friends, and many other translation errors, both by me into Chinese, and by my friends into English!

Speaking of Chinese, an interesting thing was brought to my attention: I wasn't told that I have an American accent, but instead that I have a Beijing accent when I speak Chinese.  I took that as a huge compliment, and passed the credit on to my first teacher who drilled the pronunciation into my mind.  She is from Beijing, so I guess that's where my accent comes from!  Thought my Chinese isn't that great, I am complimented on the excellent pronunciation quite often.  So thanks Cai Laoshi! :)

It's 2013!!! And busy!!!

I have to apologize to my followers and supporters.  I pledged last year to blog often.  I pledged that I'd blog twice a week... now I am lucky if I get to it twice a month!  On one hand I feel like I have failed you, my readers.  On the other hand, I have realized, and hope that you can see, as well, that it's actually a good sign when I find that I have no time to spend on the internet!  I definitely want to share with you what God's doing here, but I have found that lately I have been spending very little time on the internet outside of lesson planning and other work-related searches.

Life's been busy. New Year's was great.  I had the opportunity to spend some time with some friends (pictured above left), and it was a great time singing karaoke, eating hot pot, and counting down to the new year! My New Year's resolution was to stop drinking Coke. So far I've held true, but my friends know about it and have been tempting me!! AHH! :)

My birthday (January 3) went well. One of my friends surprised me with a ukulele and a birthday cake!  It was a lot of fun!  Later that day, I was surprised with another birthday cake and about 12 of my previous students (currently Serena's students) standing around a table singing happy birthday to me!  It was overwhelming to be able to have so many students and friends spend the day with me to make it very special! :)

The photos on either side of this paragraph were foods that I cooked for some students after we went to the orphanage. We've been collecting some clothing and toys for the kids at the orphanage, and we delivered them this week!  We then went to Serena's house and ate lots of food!  On the left you can see a Chinese dish that I made: hot and sour eggplant and pork.  On the right you can see a more familiar dish: enchiladas (minus the sauce!! It was added later)






On the left here you can see a picture of a creation wheel.  During Bible study on Friday, the kids and I learned about creation.  We talked about what happened on each day, and then we created a wheel.  They didn't finish, so we'll finish it this week!  It was fun to see their excitement about making a craft telling the story of creation! :)  And yes, I wrote the Chinese!  I had to get it checked and double checked before I actually used it during class, though!

These things are only a few of the many things that I have been doing in the past couple weeks.  Classes have started up again after the 'break', and we have many new students!  I was able to go to hot pot with some of my students (they had invited me to go out to dinner, which I was super excited about!) and I met up with a group of Christians in Macau, and was able to get connected to a group that I can easily relate to to help me get uplifted through Christian fellowship! :)

So many changes have been happening in my life in Macau, and I am excited.  It's great!  Change is good!

I have a guest coming soon: she is from my hometown, and I am stoked to be able to host her for a week!

Hopefully I'll get back to you sooner than February! :)

If you have any questions, please ask me!  And feel free to comment!  I love hearing comments and knowing that people are reading the posts! ;) That helps encourage me to write more often! :)