This Makes No Sense

Sometimes the Chinese people will do things that, as a foreigner, make absolutely no sense to me. Okay, maybe the word here should be "Oftentimes" instead of "Sometimes."

One example occurred just 2 weeks ago.

It was Monday morning. 8:30AM. First day of classes. We hear a knock on our door. We were awake, but are not accustomed to people knocking on our door that early in the morning. Michael's first class was not until 1:30pm and I don't teach on Mondays, so we had not yet taken showers or gotten ready for the day. Michael opened the door to find a small Chinese woman waiting. She spoke no English. We're used to this, so we tried to figure out what she wanted through sign language. She just kept talking and pointing to the bathroom and we just could NOT figure out what was going on. So she pulled out her cell phone and called a friend who could speak English and translate for us. She communicated to us that the school wanted to remodel our bathroom. They would have to bust out all the tile, lay new tile and grout, and allow it to dry. We would not be able to use the shower for 3 days. Please keep in mind that this is the first day of classes - and the fact that we had been gone for 6 weeks, which would have been, in our minds, the perfect opportunity to re-tile our bathroom. But, what can you do? This is life in China. We made do with the sink for a few days until we got the okay to use the shower again. It was frustrating at first and I don't understand why they had to do it this way, but now that it is all said and done, I am thoroughly enjoying our new shower that now has a drain of its own (instead of the whole bathroom floor getting wet).

In a way, I guess this is a good lesson about our Father. We spend our time in the physical. He is from somewhere different - the spiritual. So there are times when He asks us to do things that make absolutely no sense to us. We may think we know a different or even better way of doing things. But in the end, He knows what He is doing, and we are left to enjoy the great blessings of going with the flow and following in the way that He wants us to do things.