Marsha's Blog

  Hi There Friends! When we left for Hawaii, I promised you a weekly blog to read in the form of a book I wrote about 13 years ago.  It was while we were in Bangkok, but now I thought you might enjoy reading it while our schedule now is a bit erratic, and we can’t always post weekly. I may have made a BIG mistake.  I didn’t mean for you to think it was a live blog…… this week in particular talking about us becoming grandparents!  But from the responses I’m getting already, that’s exactly what a lot of you are understanding. Thank you for all your congratulations, but that baby I was talking about is turning 12 the end of this week!  For the time being, my children, both parents of wonderful boys, are happy with keeping the tally at 4.  Those guys are 12, as I mentioned, 10, 6 and 7 months. Since I’ve got your ear, I’ll give you a ‘real time’ update.  Today we enjoyed Tony’s 74th birthday, starting with a lovely donut at a Salvation Army Outreach café. ...

 Tears in the Paint Can From the book, "River Crossings" This last week we got an interesting phone call from our son Nathan and his lovely wife, Kylie. It wasn’t till the next afternoon when I was painting some drawers to match our other bedroom cabinets that it hit me. I was getting a bit bored with just the ‘whop whop’ of the fan and the smell of the paint fumes so I decided to pop in a CD that we’d found in a pile of stuff left by the last folks in this apartment. Suddenly it was 1981 and I’d just flown in from Japan to the states to adopt a perfect little two day old boy. While I was there, I had randomly bought a cassette tape of some new band who didn’t know how to spell their name, and I loved it so much I played it almost non stop for a year. Now as I began to listen to the all too familiar strains of Abba (with the backwards B) all those feelings from way back then began to come together. I saw a tear land in the paint and had to sit down and collect myself. Where d...

First Week in Bangkok Well, as I write this blog, I’m sitting at a desk, with my OLD computer hooked up, almost feeling like I’m at home. The week started off with us being dropped unceremoniously at our new digs, way way out in a neighborhood we’d never been to when we lived here before. It’s much more of a suburb than when we stayed here for a short time last year, and so we don’t have the same way of relating to our environment. Yes, there’s a big store like a ‘Walmart’ just a few blocks away, but where is my satay man or the fruit lady? How will I get clean clothes with no maid? (don’t laugh). It’s amazing how you can feel so lost when you never really ‘had’ it before. The mission had graciously put some random furniture in for us to use and as we started working I almost cried when Tony unpacked a box and found our missing Oswald Chambers devotional book. We had accused family and friends of mislaying it for us, when as usual, it was our own over-packing that had ‘lost’ it. Tony s...

 2. Last Leg to Bangkok! I heard an interesting story last week in Athens. Some of you may know it, so don’t give away the ending! It seems in 490 B.C. the Persians came to defeat the Greeks yet again in a small town south of Athens. However, this time, by some miraculous turn of events, the Greeks won handily, actually routing the Persians forever. A guy  named  Pheidyppides  was  so  excited he RAN to tell the good news to the people waiting in Athens. When he arrived, he shouted “Nenikekamen!” and proceeded to drop dead of exhaustion. You see, he had run 26 miles without a break from the battle ground town of... you guessed it, “Marathon”. “Nenikekamen” has since been shortened to “Nike” and the meaning is “Victory”. The rest of the story is history. After so many months of being in limbo, we have finally laced up our shoes and begun the “marathon” of our great race to announce “Victory” to the people of Thailand. We arrived Monday night in Bangkok after...

Here begins the series, “River Crossings”, a journal of sorts, recording the time between Australia and Japan, when Tony and I were transferred suddenly to Bangkok, Thailand. It was a bittersweet experience, and we’re definitely better people for it. I pray that you will be blessed by taking this journey with me. 1. From Mars Hill   Yesterday Tony and I watched the sun set over Athens from atop Mars Hill, at the base of the Acropolis. Back in the first century, the area was known as Areopagus, and it’s such a rocky place that the inhabitants had literally carved out walkways, steps, and the foundations of their houses in the granite. One industrious resident even built his entire home back in the rock, complete with door, window, and carvings on the walls! Standing on the spot where most agree would have been the Apostle Paul’s speaking platform, I recalled his words, recorded in Acts 17: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and loo...

 Good Morning Friends, Sorry if you’re waiting for my book to begin on this space.  Hopefully next week, I say ‘hopefully’ because we’ve got a lot to work out with the technology, but if you’re our age, you can appreciate our challenges! We have arrived safe and sound in Hawaii.  We are tucked away in our friend’s house, (they’re in Australia at the moment), loving that we can veg and get our energy back, as we ‘isolate’ for three days, as per protocol. The trip over was especially good, thanks to all your prayers.  Good in the sense that everything went as clockwork with the special Covid testing that could only be taken just hours before the flight. Our bags weighed a TON (don’t travel with a professor who takes his own textbooks), and we had to collect them from the first leg of the trip and lug them to the international airport, then wander around the airport (dragging the bags) until our test results came in and we could finally check in.  By the time we ar...