It felt like we spent forever indoors waiting for Tropical Cyclone Keni, and then when it finally came as a Category 3, it wasn’t as bad as we expected. The wind was very powerful and kept changing direction so that it buffeted rain between the windows and frames first on one side of the house, then the other, so we ended up with towels mopping up the under-window streams in every room of the house, but that’s nothing a washing machine and a sunny day the next day couldn’t fix. Our neighbour’s kids actually spent a significant portion of the day out in the cyclone; leaning into the wind, picking up fallen palm fronds, dribbling a basketball on their bottom porch step. We just watched from our dry spot inside. The flooding turned out to be a lot less than the previous weekend. We thought we got off pretty lightly, really, especially when we heard how Auckland had fared in the storms the same night and so much of the city without power. Truly, we are so fortunate here at Fulton because any time the power goes out, our generators come on and we have electricity restored within tens of minutes.
One positive consequence of the cyclone was that classes were cancelled for what should have been the first three days back after the mid-semester break so we had an impromptu extended holiday. I cannot complain about that. Once the sun came out (and actually, the sun has stayed out and we’ve had nary a drop of rain since that storm) and we’d hung out all the washing, Reggie disappeared “to my neighbour’s house” and Brent and Lucy and I went down to the basketball court. I thought I’d let Lucy play in the sand nearby but she lasted about two minutes and then made a beeline for her father.
Last Sunday, we took a brief bus trip with a number of the other students with families to some mud pools in the next road. They give you a bucket of mud, complete with complimentary leaves and twigs, and you’re meant to slather yourself with this mud and then stand in the sun a few minutes to bake it all on before gingerly squelching into the mud pool to wash it all off. (I sort of expected the pool to have a fairly solidish bottom; but, au contraire, one sank immediately – and disconcertingly – to one’s knees in what I can only assume was the same mud that had been dredged up in the aforementioned bucket. And over and over in my head played the line from My Bible Friends: ‘The river was muddy, but Captain Naaman waded out into it.’)
Lucy thought this entire process was the bee’s knees and not only consented to be painted with mud but stood beside the bucket trying to scoop it into her mouth. Reggie, in quite the opposite fashion, would have nothing to do with the mud and needed a fair amount of convincing to even get in the water. But after we’d (sort of) rinsed off the mud, they had a proper concreted, clean hot pool a little further down the path and we all luxuriated in that for a while before the bus came back. Lesley very kindly sent us the photos she’d taken of us.
This past week has been the College Week of Prayer, with the guest speaker being none other than Pr William of New Zealand. He spent each evening presenting a series of really practical and Biblical calls to ‘make Him known,’ and every morning there was a meeting for prayer (which, if you ask me, totally makes sense given it’s a week of prayer). God is working in a powerful way in this place, and I’m also thrilled by what He’s doing in my life. I’m a person who needs a lot of reminding (and some serious accountability-partnering) to keep the commitments I make to God but this week I learned some fabulous new strategies for overcoming some of the obstacles I let come in the way of doing what God is asking me to, and I’m rather excited to try them out. So I think God knew exactly what I needed to hear this week and He found a way of telling me; but more than that, it’s the same for a number of people I’ve spoken to – God has also used the week to speak to their situation – so I just want to lift Him up for providing encouragement when we need it, direction when we need it, and courage when we need it.
Reasons I Choose To Look Up 