Chinese New Year of the Monkey... and the beginning of Lent!

Happy New Year of the Monkey, everybody! One of the great advantages of life in China -- a ten day break for Chinese New Year! However, as everyone knows, when you're in the education "business" your work is never done, so Wayne was still working on the big questions: seminary education for Hong Kong and China and Southeast Asia... what's a seminary for? How can we be God's agents for the world? How can we best live together with all the challenges and opportunities of being an intercultural community of Hong Kong, Chinese, Southeast Asian (Myanmar, Cambodian, Laos, Indonesian), European and American students and faculty?

It's been COLD here in Hong Kong this spring. 55 F. may not seem
much to you hearty Midwesterners, but when it's a damp cold
and there's no central heating system anywhere, it's bone-chilling.
Good thing you can see in this picture, we have a small layer of winter fat to help insulate us...

Luckily all that hard thinking about the future of seminary education in Asia didn't keep us away from a couple of gorgeous walks in the Hong Kong hills, and a couple wonderful New Years meals with students and other faculty.

The last two weeks I (Christa) have been slaving away on an academic paper on diakonia (for my D.Min. degree... I hope to graduate by the end of 2016!) and also getting ready for a two week trip to Myanmar, where I'll be interviewing applicants to our seminary, conducting a women's bible study workshop and taking what for me is an extremely exotic trip out to a remote spot in the eastern part of the country where our school has an alumnus who is the head of a small Baptist seminary there. Should be fascinating! He said this will be the first time an outside non-Burmese has come to their place to speak (hard to believe there are still such places left in the world) and he expects about a thousand people to show up (????) but maybe he got his 100's and his 1000's mixed up (!!!)  

This will leave Wayne with nearly two weeks "on his own" but I suspect he will get in a coupla more hikes, and find other things to do in my absence.

A nap in the mountains of Hong Kong - ahhhhhh!

Peace and spiritual deepening to all of you during this Lenten season.

"Should thy mercy send me   

Sorrow, toil and woe,

Or should pain attend me   

On my path below,

Grant that I may never

Fail thy hand to see;

Grant that I may ever

Cast my care on thee."

("In the Hour of Trial", verse 3)