Rural Asian Countryside

We love taking walks around the place where we live. It is such a blessing to live out in the country away from the noise, heavy traffic and pollution of the large city in this country. Here is Melody and myself walking back home after going to our gardener's home for a meal during Eid time. The road is quite dusty at this time of year and the fields are dry and yellow, with a beauty of their own. Behind us is a very green patch where people have rice plant seedlings growing. A few days or week later they will transplant them and spread them out evenly all over the fields. The fields will then be immersed with water pumped up with a diesel water pump. During the wet seasons when there is rain there is of course, no need for pumps which saves the farmer a lot of money. We really enjoy observing how people do agriculture work here. It will be interesting to see the changes to more advance technology in the future. Already more and more tractors are being used, versus the simple plows pulled by white cows or water buffaloes. I think I will miss seeing some of the old ways go, even though it was such hard work for the farmer to plow a little plot of land. Hopefully, though, newer farmer knowledge can help provide more food and better ways to use the land! It is amazing to me to think of how God has created men and women with all these various ideas and ways of working the land.

My Beloved

This is one of my favorite pictures of my Beloved, a self portrait :-)
, taken on Melody's first birthday. Sadly, Melody was sick on her
birthday, as you may be able to tell. She did enjoy her birthday party
that day in spite of not feeling well. The poor little lamb!

One of My Favorite Pictures of Our Melody Joy

A great book

I am enjoying reading this book by Oswald Chambers, which was given to us by my mother and father-in-law. (Thank you, Dad and Mom Jore!) It is called, "So Send I You/Workmen of God" - that is, it is 2 books in one volume. It is a real gem of a book! I find it very interesting that sometimes I "discover" a book at just the right time when I may be thinking about the very issues the book addresses. To me, that is a sign of my Heavenly Father providing resources for encouragement and food for the soul at the right time.

Recently as I have contemplated our first term of service so far, it has brought me back to thinking about our call to come here. A whole host of questions have welled up inside of me as I thought back to 2 1/2 years ago, and looked ahead to the end of our 1st term in 17 months. Wow, what does it mean to be "successful" in God's eyes? Has our time here been successful to the Lord? How can we make the most of each moment with our time left here?

Here's a quote from Chambers' book:
"The greatest need of the missionary is to be ready to face Jesus Christ at any and every turn, and it is not easy to be ready to do that, whatever our experience of sanctification may be. The great battle all along is not so much against sin as against being so absorbed in work that we are not ready to face Jesus Christ. The one great need is not to face our beliefs and our creeds, or the question of whether we are of any use or not, but to face our Lord. This attitude of being ready to face Him means more and more disentanglement from so-called religious work, and more and more intense spiritual reality in so-called secular work. The whole meaning of the Christian life from our Lord's standpoint is to be ready for Him."