The same tea house I've been to a hundred times, the same worn rickety wooden benches, the same dented thermoses of sticky sweet tea, the same plate of gristly meat and soft potatoes, the same mutant stains on the same bowed ceiling, the same leaky cup of spice sharing room with the same splintery chopsticks on the same peeling wooden table, the same nonchalant waitress serving the same crazy grandfather, and my dear wide-eyed friend wiping her lips.
Lips which astounded me with advice such as 'Your buddha Yesu will give you what you need, never worry.'
And then continued to astound me by retelling the good news to me, bit by bit, recollected from a movie she had watched with tears streaming down her face this past summer. It was good news, made better somehow by the fact that she was the one telling me. She doesn't believe in His uniqueness... yet. But Him, well she loves Him.
A dingy teahouse transformed into a place where light abounds. A barren relationship transformed into a place where seeds can grow.
In another familiar teahouse later that same day I coughed and my eyes burned through the cigarette smoke of the rowdy boys at the next table, even the peach wielding monkey on a nearby poster cringed. When the boys crowded out and the haze lifted I was left peering over soupy bowls of noodles into the deep brown eyes and long black braid of a student who I have come to love deeply and the image of her thin frame prostrating before an idol still belongs to my nightmares. In the middle of a conversation about magazine articles she had read that summer I chanced to bring up a little book I had read, which compared her master and mine. In eagerness, she asked to borrow it and, in a flow of emotion I barely had time to process, she outlined the birth and development of her desire to learn more about the One I serve. I want to study about Him, Ms. Kelly. Of course.
A cigarette smoke filled hole transformed into a sanctuary. A nightmare transformed into a miracle.
And on this fifth day of my third year in Lhasa I retired to my indefinitely packed suitcases in my temporary housing in my altogether stressful and discouraging situation and rested in amazement at the work of the Holy my eyes had seen and quite nearly didn't believe.
