October Break!!

Ahh, breaks. They're so...lovely. Wonderful. Needed. Did I mention they're wonderful?

Friday was our last day of school for two weeks! After a couple weeks of frantic grading, report card assembling/printing/reassembling/reprinting, etc, the sudden leisure time is actually rather shocking. What have I done so far? Well, I've read one book already (Ted Dekker's works are hard to put down!) and plan to read at least a couple more, if I can manage it.

Let's back up a minute. The last week was interesting, for sure! Michael and a volunteer at GES (Sarah) had the opportunity to go to an "English Camp" (more of an evangelistic camp, from what I heard) for Thai university students. They went to Kanchanaburi (about 4 hours away) for four days. Unfortunately for them, almost everything was in Thai, so they didn't always know what was going on. Michael still had a great time hanging out with the university students, though! They got to go on a hike up to some waterfalls and Michael got some really beautiful pictures of the area (which will hopefully be posted soon!) Apparently there were some ferocious monkeys along the trail, too! Michael told me that another group was walking ahead of them with some chips in a 7-11 bag. One monkey came up behind these people, grabbed the bag, ran up a tree, opened the bag and began eating the chips. LOL. I guess the "Beware of monkeys stealing your belongings" and "Beware of fierce monkeys" signs were legitimate! I met and talked to some of the university students with Michael after they all got back - they seemed to have a blast and were quite happy that Michael and Sarah came along with them.


So, with Michael gone from Monday till Thursday, my week seemed quite a bit different than normal! It was really weird to come back to our apartment after school and not have anyone to talk to. I made do, though, and actually started working ahead on some things for next semester! The last week of school went really well. It was an easy week, but a fun one - definitely a good ending to the semester.

We are planning on taking a vacation to one of the (many) beautiful beaches of Thailand sometime this week. Koh Sumet, I think it's called. Not sure yet when we'll leave, but I'm SO looking forward to it! Hopefully it won't rain the whole time! Other than that, we'll be sticking around the GES campus for the second week of break. I'll use the time to plan for next semester, finish any college references I need to do for my seniors, etc. Michael will also be using some of that time to plan for his classes (he starts teaching in November!).

I guess that's about all in terms of news. We had a really great sermon today in church. The guest speaker (a member of the church who was filling in for the pastor) talked about Jesus feeding the 5,000 and walking on water. When we got home this afternoon, Michael suggested we watch a Ray VanderLaan video that was related to the same topic as the sermon. I've heard these stories so many times before, but something stuck out to me today that I hadn't thought about before. Peter got out of the boat to walk on the water with Jesus. Why? He was following the Rabbi. Peter was doing what he, as a follower, was supposed to be doing - the exact same thing as Jesus, the person he was following.

This raised the question: what am I willing to do to follow Jesus? How far am I willing to go? Some of Jesus' teachings are so difficult, so radical, so...uncomfortable! How far outside of my comfort zone am I willing to go?

I've also learned recently (or, rather, over the course of this semester) to be grateful for really good fellowship and conversations. On Friday I had after school duty, and spent an hour just standing around and talking to some of my students. I learned some new things I hadn't known before (about them and their experiences at GES) and just had a great time interacting with them. Today after church, too, a group of people went out to an Indian restaurant. The food took quite a while to get there, but it was great to just sit and chat with everyone. It really is a huge blessing to be able to form relationships with the people around us!

All in all - life is good. We hope it's the same with you!