We spent Saturday arvo out in Maribyrnong. It took us well over an hour to crawl through the inner city tram tracked roads to get there, but it was worth it as we spent the arvo with Ruth and Jonathan and 6 chek and 6 chim. Oh and little Micah of course.
Tress and I had stopped at a butcher in Box Hill the night before and we were thrilled they still had a couple of racks of ribs as we had wanted to do a roast pork ribs for the lunch with Ruth & Co. It was just past 6pm so we got the ribs and some fruit for Tress to do a fruit salad and then went home and walked the little fellow before settling down to a glass of vino. Tress had a big lunch so didn’t want dinner so I made a little bruschetta thing with toasted bread, little cherry tomatoes and smoked salmon – all left over pieces in the fridge – and top with a generous drizzle of olive oil. I then marinated the ribs and kept it away in the fridge.
Saturday morning we roasted the ribs, Tress pottered around in the garden, I did a quick vacuum and when the roast was done we cleaned up, packed the food (roast, fruit, Chinese New Year love letters, wine) and joined the traffic crawl.
The last time we caught up in a similar fashion was back in May last year, when Micah had his full moon. 6 chek had spoken about his impending China trip with a lot of enthusiasm then. He was going to spend a few months in Fuzhou to do mission work. He was going to teach the scriptures and 6 chim was going to help him and also teach English. He sounded excited and even asked if me to consider coming along.
On Saturday though, he sounded less excited. I think he has now seen more and that made him think how people can work better there. He lived simply, did not eat well and saw heavy workload heaped on the local church minister. He was totally self funded too. He has been invited back but sounded less sure about going this time.
The arvo went past really quickly and we left just before 5.
Church the next day was good – Peter talked about the state of human depravity and touched on the gay marriage issue a bit, all in the context of Romans 1:18ff. I’m still wondering about how to serve and a presentation by Kids Hope Foundation participants was very good but it needed people to do work during school hours. Maybe continue to just be there on Sundays, small groups and Men’s breakfast for now, and see where the Lord leads.
After lunch at Madam K’s we went to Westfield Doncaster for a bit of shopping before returning home to watch “Salmon on the Yemen”.
It was another weekend before another week of grind at the wheel. The challenge would be to continue to be challenged, week after week of normal grind.
Ante 