07.18.2010 - Sunday

You'll notice that I changed the background to the blog. I did that because when I copied and pasted journal entries, they were not showing up properly. Changing the background appears to have fixed the problem. :-D

Also, I've posted several times in a row. I'm basically just doing a blog entry per day of my journal. Make sure you read them all! :-D

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Apparently I was too tired yesterday to journal. We went to the beach and spent several hours there. It was fairly fun, expect for the always annoying sand and icky salty feeling after swimming. Grace, Betsy, and I snorkeled for a while, looking at the coral about 100 yards off the shore. That was fun, although after an hour my ankles started to get rather tired. Steve got us fish from the restaurant on the beach. Two fish, 10 banan-pase, and 8 bucks. It fed all of us there at the beach: Scott, Denise, Chalice, Mikayla, Joseph, Steve, Grace, Betsy, and myself. Faith stayed home to watch the preemies and to cook us dinner – enchiladas!

I don't remember much of what happened after dinner last night, so I'm just guessing I was a little tired.

I finished the Tom Clancy novel that I was reading today. I immediately started in on a book by Gavin Menzies called 1421: The Year China Discovered America. It is, so far, a fascinating book. It details how many of the maps that Europeans had when they started charting the world had items on them that were not yet discovered by them. Gavin is laying out a fairly clear history (as much of one as there can be, since much of Chinese History was destroyed by a Chinese Dynasty) of the late 1300s and the early 1400s, and the empire that Zhu Dhi built for himself. Gavin claims that the Chinese charted the entire world, basically, and first discovered America. It's a mind boggling and thought provoking book that requires one to completely leave behind the commonly accepted history of the West.

Steve got two calls this morning right before church that requested an ambulance pick up for a woman in hard labor. Grace, Denise, and I headed down to the hospital so that we could help/observe with one of the births while another doctor (Felix) did the other. Steve was only able to find one of the women, and brought her to the hospital before heading off to church where the rest of the group already was. After realizing that only one women was going to be at the hospital and making sure Dr. Felix was there to handle it, Grace, Denise, and I went on to church ourselves. Apparently the message this morning was a bit . . . non-cohesive. I wouldn't know, of course. I was reading 2 Chronicles 6, where Solomon prays for God to kind of be centralized in the temple they were building, and that every time someone humbled themselves and prayed at/towards the temple, that God would hear. God answers him in chapter 7 with the familiar, “If my people, called by My name, humble themselves and pray . . . “. I found It interesting that no where did God say they had to pray towards the temple, be at the temple, or really do anything with the temple. That was, of course, on a cursory glance. I shall continue looking at and studying the passage.

Watched the last session of the Truth Project tonight: Community. One thing stuck out to me quite strongly. It was something that C.S. Lewis said. “You have never met a mere mortal. Every human is a soul either horribly monstrous or eternally splendid.” That is not quite the wording. . . I shall have to look that up tomorrow when I have internet. Anyways, the idea that I have never met a mere mortal, that every person I have come in contact with is an eternal soul is just earth-shattering. How often do I treat people like scum? How often do I ignore the needy, the outcast, the ones that don't fit my ideas of acceptable? And yet God says that His heart is with the needy, the poor, the outcast, and is against the proud, the afflictors, etc. How convicting. :p Another thing that was interesting? God is humble. Try that one on for size.

I think I'm falling in love with this Sibelius symphony. Symphony No 2. It's pretty tight. Tomorrow marks 2 weeks that I have been in Haiti. It partially feels like it's been every bit of two weeks if not longer, and partially that it's not been that long at all. I'm wondering how the next four weeks will be. Only one more day of being a teenager too. . .