Olympics Weekend

Mike came over Thursday night for Friendspeak. We were so glad that he offered to put up the office desk with David. The new office area looked so much better after everything was set up.

Fang invited us to her house to watch the Beijing Olympics Openning ceremony together on Friday night. Paul also invited us to his new house. But his invitation was 30 minutes late. We had a great time watching the program with Fang's family. I expected the ceremony to be a good one. Still it exceeded my expectations. In my co-worker Marcy's words:" Who can top that?!" Another friends of mine said, "That will put lots of pressure on whomever going to host the next Olympics." Many people said they will definitely buy the DVD if it comes out. I was glad that the commentary provided some history behind each scene before and during the openning ceremony to help foreigners to better understand it. There was so much history and culture content in those performance! Even for a person who understood nothing about the history behind the show, he/she could still sense the spirit of pursuing excellence in the air.

I went to Erin Hughes' baby girl shower Saturday morning. While I was in the Babyrus to shop for the gifts, I bumped into a couple from Frienspeak. They studied with Don Barnett and just had a baby girl a month ago. I was late for Erin's shower. But I was glad to have a minute to talk to Amy A., Angela N., Liesl B., and many other ladies while I was there. It was a nice shower. Friday night, David and I went to our friend Sally's house for dinner. Mary Ann and her husband were there too. We had a wonderful time talking and eating together.

We visited our 5th Chinese church off Hillcrest and Frankford Sunday morning. It happened that the young preacher we liked at the first Chinese church English service was invited to preach here for the Chinese service. He did an excellent job again. His message today was "Carrying the Cross". He used so many interesting illustrations and stories and his preaching was so practical that I didn't have any time to translate to David during the sermon. I had to reserve the translation for him while we were driving to Prestoncrest. We met two families who are going to move to China to teach English in the Universities. We also bumped into two of our Friendspeak readers: Bill who studies with Jeremy E. and Brian who studied with Robert H. They were so happy to see us there and we were very glad to see our readers plugged into all these Chinese churches we've visited! We stayed for the lunch, which happened to be one of the senior member's 90th birthday celebration. The couple who sat with us were former missionaries to Vietnamn and Indonisia. We wished we had more time to visit with them!

Hongyu came to the International Bible class with us. Keith did a great job teaching this week. After the class, Hongyu asked some questions about how to recognize the voice from God. Those were really good questions. He didn't have lunch before the class so he didn't go to the service with us. There were lots of people in Friendspeak! Maggie and I read about Noah's Ark. We had another good reading session. After Friendspeak, we went to April's apartment to give her some household stuff. She called yesterday that she needed a matress, a book case, a shoe rack, an organizer, some dishes and clothes hangers. Dawn had an organizer and some dishes and hangers to give to her. DG found a shelf. We had a few dishes and hangers. That should get her started in her new apartment. We did see someone giving away a shoe rack in UTD. But when we knocked at the door, nobody answered. April was so happy to see all the stuff that we took to her. She invited us to sit down for a glass of juice. We talked for half an hour before she brought up some questions: Do Christians think all the unbelievers bad? Do Christians work in order to be saved? ... We were really shocked when she said that she really believed The Tower of Babel. She told us she actually had a Bible and a Christian teacher at her University went through some Bible studies with her. We had a wonderful conversation about belief and life until 9:30pm when I suddenly remembered that I had to call my parents. April has a sharp mind and very good conversation skills. I'm sure we'll coss each other's paths many times in the future.

Amy sent us a scripture tree. We decided to click on one flower on the tree to pick the verse of the week. It turned out to be Luke 10:16 "He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me."