Marsha's Blog

  Got the Bubble? (Note to Reader: This is another in our series of “River Crossings” blogs, written while we were in Thailand (2009-2011). Enjoy!) The other day as I was pouring myself a glass of water from our kitchen dispenser (you CAN drink the water in Bangkok, but only at your peril), I was startled by a loud gurgling sound, followed by silence... a sure sign that it was time to lug a new water jug into the house. The sound took me back to a faint childhood memory, sitting around the table while Mom poured Dad a cup of coffee. Suddenly a tiny burp came from the spout, and then Dad’s coffee was being filled with that muddy sediment from the bottom of the pot. “Uh oh,” she said, “Looks like you got the bubble.” And from then on, the phrase took on a whole world of applications, all related to the fact that whatever we were doing, or pouring or saying, was just about to come to an end. “Getting the bubble” meant the last dregs were being drained out, and there was no more to come. N

 Floating Our Boat (Note to Reader: Today we’re back to “River Crossings”, excerpts from our stay in Thailand a few years ago. We will intersperse these with “Real Time” reports from along the road as we make our circuitous journey back home to Australia. For today, please enjoy…) This week we experienced one of Thailand’s huge festivals known as “Loy Krathong”, which roughly translated I think means something like “Float Your Boat”. According to what we can work out with our limited Thai, it began about a thousand years ago, when someone made a “krathong”, or a basket out of banana leaves, and put in it all of their bad feelings and ‘sins’, lit a candle on it and floated it away on the river. A beautiful image, when you think about it, and one which no one in our line of work would want to miss. Of course, we didn’t go to the river to float away our sins. In fact, we didn’t even go to the river. As it turned out, there were a few hundred thousand folks who opted to go instead to our v

(Note to Reader: Today we’re back to “River Crossings”, excerpts from our stay in Thailand a few years ago. We will intersperse these with “Real Time” reports from along the road as we make our circuitous journey back home to Australia. For today, please enjoy…) The Thais must be a very clever people. We’ve been studying ‘reading and writing’ for two weeks, and our brains are about fried. Language is such an interesting thing. Last night we went to see one of our missionary kids star in the high school play, “The Miracle Worker”. Tony said he could really relate to Helen Keller, stumbling around bumping into walls, screaming and throwing tantrums because she wasn’t understood. As you can recall, she just needed to COMMUNICATE! One of the students in my class at language school laughs now that she’s realized that during the first month of school, she kept going up to strangers and saying in Thai, “Hello, what’s my name?” ...Oh how we can relate! Let me give you a little language lesson.

 Hello! It’s been a couple of weeks since we stepped in and said ‘hello’, so I thought I’d do that for this week’s blog. I saw an interesting quote from Helen Keller today.  “A bend in the road is not the end of the road, unless you fail to make the turn”. How ironic was this!  The reason we were ‘seeing’ this was that, instead of gathering with our missionary veterans of 40 years for the reunion we’ve been anticipating for over a year, we were watching it on Zoom from a few miles down the road. Yep, you guessed it. The “bend in the road” for us this week is CoVid.  Remember that we were going on a cheap cruise a couple of weeks ago? It was lovely, sailing down the Baja Peninsula and stopping at a few Mexican ports of call along the way. By the time we stepped off the gangplank back in California, we (apparently) had both contracted CoVid. True to the reports we’ve read, it was almost a non-event; like a cold that settles in your sinuses. We continued the journey to Birmingham, Alabama

(Note to Reader: Today we’re back to “River Crossings”, excerpts from our stay in Thailand a few years ago. We will intersperse these with “Real Time” reports from along the road as we make our circuitous journey back home to Australia. For today, please enjoy…) Do any of you remember as a child reading your first word? For our boys, it was the “Toto” brand on Japanese toilets. For Nicki, I think it was “kaka”, only because Nathan would write it down and go to great pains to teach it to her, then roll over laughing when she’d try it out on us. For Tony and me, yesterday, it was the unabandoned joy of reading the word “YAA” in Thai letters and understanding that it meant “medicine”. Never mind that it was written just over a huge sign in English which said “Pharmacy”; we would have gotten it; honest. We were so excited. I wish I could write it for you in Thai so you could be impressed, but my computer would probably blow up. Anyway, along with our first driving experience in Bangkok, it

 Lost  (Note to Reader: Today we’re back to “River Crossings”, excerpts from our stay in Thailand a few years ago. We will intersperse these with “Real Time” reports from along the road as we make our circuitous journey back home to Australia. For today, please enjoy…) I want to say something about the word, “lost”. We sometimes use it to describe death: “I lost my wife”, “I lost a child”, and in the same breath, talk about losing our keys, our way, our train of thought, our sense of purpose. One word, but worlds of difference. This week some dear dear friends ‘lost’ their baby, stillborn at 7 months. But in the midst of our grief, we had to remember that he’s NOT LOST!  We all know exactly where he is: he’s WITH his heavenly Father. What is truly lost is OUR experience with him. We were looking forward to knowing him and we feel robbed of that. We are lost to seeing his smile, hearing his little laugh, watching him bring his mommy a muddy frog or toddle off to school. We lost the chan