Count it all joy!

A huge thanks to visual preacher Amber Bergeson for this shot of Wayne & me and our neighbor, a visiting pastor/scholar from Germany, Dr. Wolfhart Schlichting.  We had all gone to church together  and we always walk past this fountain on our way home from Union Church on Sunday mornings. So this time, with our friend Wolfhart (whom Wayne likes to call "Braveheart" because he keeps on taking vast new challenges in his life, such as coming to Hong Kong to teach at the age of 70),  we clambered into the spray!

Yesterday Youngest Son (who has a week off from school) and I took the cable car to visit the Big Buddha, on Lantau Island. 

It's a challenge to do a day trip with a 17 year old, even a relatively nice 17 year old. He absolutely forbade me from posting any of the pictures I took of him... but if you look very very carefully you can see him in the red shirt, walking way ahead of me as if he doesn't know me, at the bottom of the walkway to the Big Buddha.

At today's chapel service at LTS, the international students led us in worship and one of them told us that, "one sentence of praise is worth an hour of prayer."  I'm not sure how authoritative that statement is.... but I like it!  How often we dwell on the negative and what all we need help with, side-stepping the beauties and joys God strews on our path.

May we never become what St. Teresa of Avila referred to when she said, "Lord preserve us from sour, vinegary Christians!"

May we not be the kind of religious communities that paste this kind of sign over all our hearts and minds

but instead, cultivate a sense of joy & praise in the midst of all things.

(I've been waiting for a while to use THIS particular photo of my beloved husband!)

"Count it all joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds... "
      -- St. James, brother of Jesus


"Be joyful always" -- St. Paul, messenger of Jesus