It's 10:30 PM in Petaling Jaya. We all fell asleep aboaut 4 PM. Kevin and I just woke up; we have turned off the kids' room lights; I wish they would all sleep till morning, but that seems nearly impossible.
There's a loud, metallic band playing ourside our hotel - somewhere in the strange theme park which seems oddly unthemed; I can see a Native American chief on a mountaintop, a volcano, a castle, a dozen life-sized carved elephants from my balcony. On the other side of the entrance (through a shopping mall complete with an ice-skating rink) is a three story tall sphinx-like creature with a lion's head. Welcome to Malaysia.
The internet connection in our room hasn't been working; the toilet would have overflowed just now if I had not pulled off the tank lid and stopped it. We've discovered that the "everything" store in the mall does not carry any non-prescription pain killers or decongestants, though you can buy something called "Essence of Chicken" and various Indian-looking potions which give no indication of what they are meant to treat. I guess you just know that if you live anywhere they are sold.
M just woke up. She took her Tin Tin book out on the balcony where she is sipping coconut milk through a straw from a whole coconut. The sound of the man-made waterfall in the water park can be heard when the band takes a break. The really long hanging walkway stretching from one side of the park to the other (think of the Emperor's New Groove. . . ) is strung with lights.
Our five year old saw her first burkha today. The sight is always made doubly strange by the fact that the men accompanying these shrouded figures are so often wearing shorts and t-shirts. It feels so different than encountering an Amish couple, for example, who are at least a matched set. These pairs always have a whiff of domination and servility about them.
Ivy also tried guava, mango and watermelon juice today. She's remembering to point with her thumb, not forefinger, and is taking most most things in stride. She's a pro on a plane by now - reminding us about the seat belt lights and tray tables if we miss the cues. She knows when to pull out her passort and boarding pass and grabs her own bin for her shoes and bag at security checkpoints.
She's trying to figure out the difference between "staring" and "looking," which is not an easy distinction for me to explain. At a Thai restaurant at lunch today she was interested in the women in traditional costumewho kept hovering around our table, but also noticed the large fish tank in the center of the room. When I asked her if she wanted to go look at the fish she declined, but correctly noted that, "The fish wouldn't mind if I stared at them."
All in all, the trip was amazingly smooth. We only lost one bag out of 14, the one with my clothes and toiletries, of course, and made all our connections easily. The 16 hour flight was a breeze- between sleeping and eating non-stop, and watcing videos on their personal screens, no one was even bored. I manged to finish a novel I've been working on for weeks - reading, not writing. We have, by the grace of God, gotten along pretty well, too, with only a few minor squabbles despite frayed nerves and bloodshot eyes.
One ongoing disagreement is over the ontoloogy of "home." We find we are all constantly defining and redefining the word "home" in our conversations, which is not, I guess, unlike what happens on an extended vacation; but we keep reminding each other that we are NOT on vacation. The casual phrase, "when we get home. . . . " has acquired an ambiguous context. The speaker is required to to clarify whether he means, "back to the hotel room," "moved into our new house," (though I don't think anyone has actually used the phrase that way yet), or, "back to New Hampshire." P is the strict constructionist among us; "home" has one and only one meaning for him. He even took us to task in the restaurant today for telling the server we'd like to take some of the leftovers "home with us." They would no longer be worth eating if we did that, he pointed out.
So here I sit in a lovely hotel room on the far side of the world, away from almost everything and everyone I hold dear. I freely confess that I don't know why I'm here, though I am holding onto the memory of that morning in June when I felt as if God had punched me in the solar plexus (that's really how I felt; I don't know why), and the decision to move here became a matter of simple obedience, no longer a choice that was up to me to make.
I dread moving into our beautiful, sterile new house. I dread the morning just 4 days away when K drives off to work and leaves the rest of us in a huge, empty house with nothing on the schedule, no friends to call, nowhere to go - a van in the car park but no one to drive it, bereft of our familiar comfort objects, bereft of the novelty of just having arrived.
Then I remember that I have often longed for the experience I have had in the past of having to cling desperately to God and to my feeble faith in Him when there was nothing else to sink my fingernails into. In recent years my soul has grown fat and comfortable (alright, not just my soul!). My church and friends have been a safety net, my children have been happy with their lives, our parents have been in relatively good health. I have had my little niches and my familiar haunts so I have not really needed to hang onto God for all I was worth. But I sense that is no longer the case.
And I wonder if that's really why I'm here - if it's not for some "ministry" I fancy I might have in someone else's life, but if might be primarily for me, to save me from my self-centered, self-satisfied, self-sufficient, self-serving life. If that's God's purpose, in part or in the whole, He is off to a great start.
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