Thanksgiving

It was Monday morning, November 14, 2011, and I had just finished a translation session with Joy1 and Joy2 and was asked to wait a little while and have lunch at the church. Joy1 went back up to the fifth floor to her office to work, I talked with Joy2 about our upcoming Love Language seminar, and then I went down to the first floor lobby to kill some time and found five women, who were my class members, sitting around a table cutting cloth and sewing the pieces together.

Very quickly I realized I had a blog entry in the making and since I happen to have my camera with me I got several pictures. Joy2 soon joined me and we started talking about what they were doing, or maybe accomplishing?

Thanksgiving was coming and they wanted to give some small gift to those that came to church Thanksgiving Sunday. Considering who might take one they decided they needed to make 500 little gifts. The gift was to be a little purse, measuring about three inches by seven inches. You can kind of get the idea from the pictures.

Two of them are shown in the above picture. The one on the left with the little girl was given to me to give to Connie as their thanks for letting me come to China to bless their lives with my teaching. They said that she could give the gift to her youngest granddaughter to play with or maybe put her new cell phone in she might get for Christmas; cell phone for Christmas; I don’t think so!

These five gals have a big job on their hands to produce 500 by Thanksgiving, but I have a suspicion they might be joined by others before long. They aggressively tried to get me to pitch in and help, but I explained that my saws and nail guns were probably the wrong tools for the job. They just smiled and held up scissors and a needle.

There is more of a story here that I would like to tell. I asked Joy who they planned to give this gift to. Her answer of “Everyone who would take one” left a surprised look on my face and caused her to ask me who I thought would like the gift. My response of preteen girls kind of brought everything to a grinding halt. Now I was on the spot and I started to ask some questions and quickly realized that I was dealing with a cultural issue. I asked what their objective was that was to be supported by giving this preteen girl gift to everyone. Her response of “We didn’t think of that” is what caused me to realize there was something really different going on here that I needed to understand. They asked if it was necessary to have a reason to give a gift. Can’t you give something just because you want to give it? To understand this I had to ask why it would be given to a man and what did you expect he would do with it? Their response of “I don’t know. We haven’t thought about that.” really had me thinking now. Now they started thinking and thought the man might sense the thanksgiving spirit and give it to someone else who might really like it. That is when a very big light turned on and they picked up one and gave it to me and implied, “You with the western mind, take this with our love and give it to your wife so she can give it to her granddaughter.” I guess they wanted me to understand what they were doing and they went back to sewing and talking and having the best time you can imagine. Within a few minutes it was lunch time and we all sat down around the lunch table and talked and ate and laughed and had one special time together.

Joy1 came down from the fifth floor and joined us for lunch and afterwards she asked if I was walking home. If so she wanted to walk with me for ten minutes and then walk back alone and take a short nap in her office. She has had two heart operations and needs to get plenty of rest. She has an irregular heartbeat like I do and tiredness makes it worse. We walked and talked about our hearts and our five years of teaching together and realized God had worked greatly in our lives and so richly blessed us and our work.