Never Forsaken

 (Note to Reader: This is another in our series of “River Crossings” blogs, written while we were in Thailand (2009-2011). Enjoy!)


The word for ‘acquaintance’ in Thai is “Rui Jack”. It’s not spelled that way, but that’s how it sounds. Funny sounding, really … so much so that I remember it by going back to that silly movie, “Kangaroo Jack” and associating it with an ‘acquaintance”: just sorta ‘hopping’ in and out of your life.


Yesterday we went to a Japanese concert organized by the two groups we work with in town. We caught up with a lady and her family that were in the Japanese church in Hong Kong where we pastored briefly in 1996. We hadn’t seen her in 14 years, but of course in the family of Christ, it was just like yesterday. Then last night we had dinner with a missionary and reminisced about people we’d known and worked with years and years ago but are now lost to us. We were ‘rui jacks’ and now they’ve ‘hopped’ out of our lives… maybe till we meet again in heaven!


Do you think Jesus ever had ‘rui jacks’? Is He the kind who would just get to know you and then leave the scene? You know the answer to that. Isn’t it great that He never NOT knows you or worse yet, would ever FORGET you? The human in me wonders if He ever WISHES He didn’t know some people… but of course you know that answer to that too!


I digress. On the news front, we’ve completed language level two, but have decided (in mutual agreement with our teachers) that it would be a good thing if we take a break from the organized classroom and just spend this month ‘getting it up to speed’. They say we’ve got the vocabulary and know the forms; we’re just a bit slow off the block when we speak. So the plan starting tomorrow is to meet separately with a private tutor every day and PRACTICE  PRACTICE PRACTICE for the next month. Without fellow classmates to keep us honest, I’m a little afraid that we’ll get lazy, but on the other hand going nose to nose with a tutor may actually double our output! 

Pray for us. Tony’s filling up his schedule with Japanese preaching and church work, which is exciting in itself, but we must consider it a distraction till we GET this LANGUAGE! As I said, we’d appreciate your prayers to stay on course.


 Have a great week, fellow rui jacks. And wherever things take us, may we never lose track of the mob. 


Tony and Marsha


Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:5 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Surprises in the Snow

 Last week I talked about three great men who impacted our lives for the good: Steve Metcalf, Eric Liddell and David Hayman. This morning, just for a break, I’d like to tell you, as that late great news commentator Paul Harvey used to say, ‘The Rest of the Story’ about Steve. Tony and I had heard this story a number of times back when we knew and often worked together with the Metcalfs, but we still shake our heads in wonder. After being released from the POW camp in China and being reunited briefly with his family, Steve went to Japan in 1952 to be a missionary.  This was to the people he had hated so much from his wartime internment camp, but thanks to his friend and fellow prisoner Eric Liddell, had learned how to forgive.  He was single, and so attacked Japanese language school with a fervor given to those who were not encumbered with family.  I look back on my own language school experience, and it still makes me tired!  We had a family, and we found that learning what one 16th ce
Read more

Farewell to a Friend

Good morning,   Many of you know that we have a place in our house where we hang pictures of selected men and women. We call it our ‘Wall of Witnesses”, and it’s based on Paul’s mention of his Cloud of Witnesses in Hebrews 12:1, those who have gone before us and encourage us to run the race with perseverance.  We started our wall many years ago and now have 9 couples who we believe to have helped make us who we are. Of course you’ll see our parents there, a loving and Godly grandmother, but the other people we’ve picked up along the way, all greatly impacting our lives. Unfortunately for us, only a few of these people remain with us today, and it certainly hurt (selfishly) to hear this morning that yet another one has gone to be with the Lord.  But the good news is that he was ready. In his 90’s, now free of pain and rejoicing with his wife…… only having been separated from her for two years. His name was Howard Kroese, but he preferred to be called by his grandkids and younger asso
Read more

T'was a Dark and Stormy Night

  Happy New Year (almost)!   Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever read the short story by James Thurber called, “The Night the Bed Fell”, but we had a similar event last week.   First came Christmas Dinner at Nathan & Kylie’s place (since it’s big enough to accommodate all of us). It was a huge feast, enjoyed by most all our Aussie relatives, and a couple of friends to boot. There was enough food to feed a small army, which is good, because the next day …   … we moved camp with the gang (about 15 or so of us) over to our house for a ‘leftover meal’, showcasing several new dishes and uncountable desserts.   Finally, most of them went to their separate homes, and by God’s Grace managed to get safely inside before a major storm hit the Gold Coast later that night. Tragically, it was killer, rather like the kind of tornadoes we get in America’s Midwest, but covering hundreds of square miles and lasting most of the night. Our own house missed most of the damaging wide and rain, but the nex
Read more