Dawn of a glorious day

It is a wonderful Sunday. The temperature is supposed to be in the mid-60s throughout next week, until it will abruptly plummet back into the 30s. So we are enjoying it while we can!

Tomorrow we begin teaching again. Most of the students have not returned from their break. The campus is still fairly empty. So we are speculating about what the campus will look like later today, when supposedly 50,000 students will return at once. That's like the size of a small city migrating en masse. It should be fun to watch!

This morning we met in our team leader's apartment downstairs for a time of fellowship. Just like what usually happens when we try to meet together in His name, there is always some distraction. It is most often in the form of soldiers drilling or music blaring on the loudspeakers outside. Today it is just the music.

It seems to me that they put on a scratchy record entitled, "Best Communist Hits of 1952" and keep replaying it over and over. And there's no hiding from it, not even in your bedroom with your own music playing. The video I've added is just a snippet of the music from my window on the 5th floor, and that's when it was playing more quietly. The same song has been playing for the past four hours. Enjoy!

When we wandered into the neighborhoods to eat dumplings for lunch, we passed a shop that had been cleared out. The same song was playing from the shop. Inside there was a gigantic black-and-white portrait of an old woman hanging on the back wall. Huge black bows and bunting hung everywhere. Incense was burning, and people sat by the door in the narrow alley. They looked like they were mourning. I think we had stumbled upon a funeral or something. So now I still have no idea why that music was playing everywhere we went. You couldn't escape from it.

After lunch Rachael and I put on our rollerblades to skate around campus, because we desperately needed to exercise in this wonderful weather. With Rachael I was a little bit more adventuresome. So we skated out of the back gate past the smiling guards, and into the alleys. There is a relatively smooth, open street right behind the campus that is also well shaded. So we skated up and down that for a long time.

Although the streets weren't crowded yet, there were still plenty of pedestrians. One man pedaling his bicycle cart nearly crashed into a tree watching us skate. Then we ventured more into the other alleys. For the most part, I was just trying not to skate into the trash or off the street, so I wasn't paying any attention to people. Once and a while, though, I looked up to see little children laughing and elderly people staring in shock at us. All the while, we skated to that mystery music, like our own soundtrack.

Tomorrow I begin teaching again! I think I'm ready! Will you please keep us in your thoughts? I want the next five months to really count for Him.

P.S. A student said they saw my team and me on CCTV (China's national state-run television channel) "celebrating the New Year." That is like being on CNN, but in a country with 1.3 billion people. I'll be signing autographs later. ;)