Slippery steps up to my student's sister's single room tidier than I had ever seen it. I was greeted by a steaming cup of sweet milk tea and a bashful student blinking behind thick glasses. She spent the next hour describing at curious, though exciting, length about each of her teachers and her recent classroom experiences of note. I finally remembered the plastic bag brought through the mud containing some very precious Books which her sister had asked for but I had been unable to give at the time. Her words of gratitude for the small bag were echoed by own gratitude to the One whose timing is always right.
He is not a man who lies, or a son of man who changes His mind. Does He speak and not act, or promise and not fulfill?
A heavily cologne scented jeep and a very interesting Chinese colleague and I arrived at a hotel restaurant with scant parking just in time for a birthday party of a Chinese girl who I've only met once but who insisted I join them. Uncomfortably formal chairs occupied by total strangers dotted an overly large table that was already filling up with the typical odd combination of Chinese dishes that adorn random events like jewels in a crown. Most difficult to swallow: a delightful dish of popcorn and deep fried cicadas. Happy Birthday.
The man immediately to my right, shocked into a dull stupor at the assertion that I don't drink alcohol, decided instead to regale me with his flashy new cell phone. One of the applications: a digital copy of the Book in Chinese. He admitted to reading it occasionally, though his expression upon hearing that I read it every day foreshadowed a more investigative future approach and made even the crispy cicadas and awkward birthday singing go down smoothly.
... and you know with all your heart and all your soul that none of the good promises He made to you has failed. Everything was fulfilled for you...
Later, as I sat on a cushion in a dark room and drank bitter tea across from a table cut out of a tree, my stomach gurgled but I begged my interesting colleague to tell me a story anyway. He spoke of always being different, of always feeling that there was something inside of him that wasn't the same even when he was small. He talked of light meeting light and how some people are like radios and if you are on the same station music comes out. I swished the tea in my mouth and silently asked my Father to become the right station for this man.
Therefore, while the promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear so that none of you should miss it.
Tired of being the object of intense scrutiny of the man scratching his nose less than a foot from me, I insisted we just buy the books and leave the small charmingly disorganized shop. We ended up in a nondescript tea house that we always end up in where another friend proceeded to tell a story of his latest mishap with such vigor that sweet milk tea ended up all over his pants, my shoes, and the floor. His hometown dialect being so far removed from the Lhasa vernacular resulted in the amusing situation in which I chatted with the tea house owner about how messy the boy was while he struggled to understand. He gave me a pen, and promised another tea, and we left with the road wide for future opportunities of conversations of more eternal value.
He does not delay His promise as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.
The sky was black to the east as storm clouds tickled the mountains and I perched on a slightly warped bus seat. I stared through the grubby window as the mucky street still thick with mud rolled by. The nomad baby squealed in the seat beside me and the bus driver turned up the static riddled tune wishfully advising: a better day when night belongs to dawn, you gotta be strong... a better day will come. I glanced up. There, so faint I squinted and squirmed to see it better, there nearly concealed by a patch of cloud, there, surely there... a rainbow. The first I've ever seen in Lhasa.
I rejoice over Your promise like one who finds vast treasure.
Like one who finds deep fried cicadas in their popcorn bowl. :)
