From the Land of dragon boats

Something cool:

so, today in Hong Kong was the annual Dragon Boat festival race/competition thing. in all honesty, it was totally different than what i thought it was going to be, but it was still pretty fascinating. i had envisioned these ginormous (is that a word?) boats all decorated chinese style like dragons floating down the Sha Tin river like a pirade. this was not the case. it was a race! an oaring race to be exact. each long boat has a dragon head and tail and holds about 24 people that all oar to the beat of a drummer in the front of the boat. pretty amazing. i forgot my camera cord to attach pics this week, so i will send next time. (ps, mom and dad if you come this time next year, you could see it!)

something spiritual:

so, i had a spiritual epiphany the other day. nothing amazing happened. i just taught a young mother on the MTR on the way home from a meeting. we sat and chatted very comfortably at first and the topic easily fell into why i am here in Hong Kong - serving a mission and teaching people about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. "keuih baai sahn," that is to say, "she worships god(s)"...which means a multitude of things here....:) but, she had never once in her life thought that God is an actual being or that there is one God. and that he is her father in heaven who loves her and cares about her and wants her to have joy in her life and know that her life has a purpose. we talked about prayer. i taught her how to pray. she said that she would try it. she was worried because she didn't believe in Jesus Christ, so God might not listen to her prayer. i said that didn't matter. i told her that God would hear her prayer if she tried and that Jesus Christ would understand, as she hasn't learned about him yet...:) and as i told her that, it hit me very strongly that what i was saying was true. the simplest thing. we are children of our father in heaven and he loves us and our life has a purpose. and we can pray to him and he'll listen. how strange to go through life without this knowledge and just think that life is life and nothing else. i talk with so many people every day and even if they don't have the desire to learn about what i have to share with them, if i can at least give them the knowledge that they are a child of God, it brings me so much joy. when i told this young mother, i could see the lights turn on inside of her. she looked at me with the most intense gaze. i will never forget it. i will probably never see her again in the masses of people in this city, but i am filled with joy when i think that God has helped me touch her life as well as so many other people's lives and helped them to know who they really are - children of God.