April….tomorrow?
I look ahead as March Madness rolls on toward its climax this coming weekend while I look back on the beginning of this month here on its last day and wonder how it seemingly just evaporated into a time vacuum. For me, March began not with madness but series of sudden events and a mad dash to join my kids in Southeast Asia while their mom returned to Canada to be with her family that lost Dabney, her stepmom, to a sudden and fatal heart attack. This came only days after my family and this world lost a great one when my uncle, the senior most male member of our family, also passed away suddenly from a stroke. Maybe all that’s why March, 2010 "suddenly" seems to be over.
So much took place in this month I can hardly recount it all. Two deaths, the birth of my new nephew, an unplanned, week-long tour of Southeast Asia with my kids to Bhutan, Thailand, and Laos, the lost passport and visa adventures of leaving China and moving in and out of 3 countries, hiking, temples, archery, special time at an orphanage with 29 children cared for by one adult couple, feeding and washing 33 elephants rescued by a most unlikely and diminutive lady, planting 120 trees where 30,000 others had been added in only the prior 10 months, and Muay Thai kick boxing with some semi-professionals. And then there was plenty of after arriving back in Beijing as a both a final blast of snow and Spring arrived in the same week while we were redeveloping training plans and programs for next year, participating in the close of our session with Dot’s amazing Genius Group of Gladiators from Class G, and joining our team to help lead worship at the English Fellowship service of Haidian Christian church. I’m aiming to unpack each of these separately here in a series of new posts, so hang on for more, including a few flashbacks from earlier this year as well.
Meantime, for now we can welcome April tomorrow and a new month full of more joyful uncertainty to experience. In store is a brand new session, TIP #35, with 100s of new students arriving, and when it wraps up a chance will arrive to visit bunches of TIP alumni students, as well as training the trainers for the dozens of new TIP facilitators that will arrive this summer, and preparing for the next chapter back in the great "nation" of Texas when I return in just 2 months for a new adventure with Teach for America. I have a feeling they will pass quickly just as March did.
