Marsha's Blog

 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 ...

(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...

So, as they used to say, "We interrupt this program with a special bulletin".  While you continue to read thru my book, "River Crossings" from years ago,  I thought I'd jump in and catch you up with life on the road thus far. This week, we left the beautiful island of Oahu, and have now landed safely in Los Angeles.  Tony finished his four-month term as guest professor at Gateway Seminary’s Hawaiian satellite school.  He confessed that it’s going to be a shock to no longer be known as “Dr. Woods” by everybody we’ve had any contact with. And with the shortage of pastors all over Hawaii, it’s been a feast of opportunities to preach at least once every Sunday, sometimes twice. For Tony, it’s been like pouring gasoline on a fire. We just don't have sufficient words to say how fun, rewarding and inspiring it’s been for both of us. Proverbs 27:17-23 comes to mind as a passage that best describes what we’ve been experiencing these last 4 months: “Iron sharpens iron...

(Note to Reader: This is another in our series of “River Crossings” blogs, written while we were inThailand (2009-2011). Enjoy!)  I’m getting more confused. Today I asked in flawlessThai where there was an air-conditioned cafe, followed their directions in Thai, found it, went in, sat down, wiped off some of the sweat and very politely… ordered a SKIRT!(It’s that tone thing again; never mind).We were visiting the world’s largest (who’s measuring?) outdoor market. I really don’t like the place because as soon as you step ‘in’ you’re lost. I had a list. I wanted to find seeds to grow some mint (OK, maybe I’m a little bit homesick) and maybe some fresh vegetables. Instead, we walked thru millions of fish, dead, alive, or struggling.Then there were the deep-fried bugs, a real treat for the gourmand, I’m told, the illegal endangered birds who aren’t being taken care of well a tall, and of course all the temple furnishings, tourist frip frap and enough jeans to cover all the legs in the ...

  Happy Easter 2022 Everyone! Just to clarify, today's blog is still a rerun from the past,  but related specifically to Easter. In the real world, we are still in Hawaii, but our time here is quickly coming to a close. Tony is preaching his last sermon before we pack up and head east on Wednesday. We'll send along travel updates as we can, interspersed with "River Crossings" excerpts. Stay tuned! Good morning! I’ll keep this short so you can tie that Easter bonnet on…….(or in the case of my antipodal friends, eat another Cadbury egg). We’ve just returned from a great day at Funabashi Baptist.  They studied the Anagion course that Tony’s busy creating, wished us all goodbye and then we all worshipped together with a great sermon and Lord’s supper.   The pastor made a thought provoking observation.  He postulated that perhaps Mary Magdalen didn’t recognize Jesus  at the open and empty tomb because she was looking for a dead body, not a risen Lord. ...

 (Note to Reader: This is another in our series of “River Crossings” blogs, written while we were in Thailand (2009-2011). Enjoy!) You’ve heard the phrase ‘what goes around comes around’. Today I’d like to tell you a story. It involves (1) two fresh faced young missionaries a lifetime ago and (2) Tony getting a suit made this week. In the early 70’s we were going out on our first assignment to Africa. We were young, we were enthusiastic and idealistic, we had NO IDEA! (but that’s another story). There was a guy at the mission board to train us; he was quiet and unobtrusive. He rarely spoke up and although I remember him, I remember very little. I think he was old… maybe 40 or something. He didn’t really make any huge impression on us except that he’d been somewhere in the world for a long time and maybe he didn’t have the best clothes or the latest haircut. That’s all. Now fast forward to this last week. We were taking a short cut from our mission office to the train and were passi...