Birthday, bush church, and COOKIES!

This weekend was pretty eventful, and awful fun. On Saturday, the boys took a 3 hour trek each way to a cave with the intent of batting down fruit bats with sticks. Sound fun? Yeah, not to me either. (You can read about their adventure here). I stayed behind with the little boys and went to a 5 year old birthday party for Olivia Dooley. It was a pool party and would have been super fun if Thane wasn't feeling under the weather. :( Caleb had a good time splashing in the pools though and we got to eat some cake- so that in itself made it a good day. At the end of the party, the boys had returned with a bat so Scott Dooley cooked it up and Allison (the oldest Dooley girl) ate it.... with a little coaxing. :)

On Sunday we went to Masi church with the Dooleys. Masi is a little bush church about a 30 minute walk from the station. The scenery on the way to church was, per usual, breathtaking and a great way to spend Sunday morning. The service was completely in Pidgin, but they were definitely serving the same God and I loved being in their worship. (I have a video of the service to post when I return, but it is too slow here to upload it all.) I think one of my favorite songs was, loosely translated, "boss me, papa God." How hard is that to say! Caleb always says to me, "I can't wait until I can be my own boss", and it's true. As humans, what other purpose in life do we have then to complete our own goals as we set them for ourselves. We are the center of our own universe. It goes against our nature to say, "okay God, you boss me." Even when we do say that, it's just really uncomfortable when He wants us to do something that we don't want to do. Then you have that nagging feeling that you HAVE to do something or you will be in trouble with God. We can try and compare this to a parent/child relationship, but it still doesn't work. The main difference between God and me in this aspect, is that with my own children, when I am "bossing them" I am just making my best guess on what is best, but God, yeah, he really does know best.

On the walk back from church, we took a short cut and waded through the river. There were quite a few people down there and they got a kick out of all the little white kids splashing around with their clothes off. Before we came here, I had told a few people that when you come here, you understand what it is like to be a celebrity; people always watching and following you. I have learned on this trip however, that it is more like being a zoo animal. You know how you sit at the gorilla cage and just watch for them to do something crazy so that you can all laugh. Or, you bang on the glass to get them all riled up so you can laugh. Yeah, that's us....the gorillas...albino gorillas.

To wrap up our fantastic weekend, two pretty little Dooley girls came to my door with a delivery of what can only be described as the most heavenly cookies I have ever tasted. We each had a cookie (I had two) then put the plate aside to save for later. A few minutes later, Apa, who I wrote about in an earlier blog, came by to pick up my brother for an evening church service. I asked him to come in and he was absolutely thrilled. When he sat down, I offered him a cookie. Now, of course in the states, you wouldn'

t dare pick up a cookie and hand it to someone, you offer them the plate so they can pick their own for sanitary purposes. Well, not here. When I offered him the plate to pick a cookie, he took the whole plate and sat down at the table with it. Now, mind you, there were probably 6 cookies on this plate. In desperation, I risked being rude and said, "just one Apa, these are for us too." Somehow that did not translate though, and he just kept eating the cookies while talking to us about how kind we were and how he could feel God's presence when he is around us. As he got up to leave, I felt a glimmer of hope as two cookies remained on the plate. With a big smile though, he said, "oh, thank you so much, I will just take these with me because we have to go." After they left Ben and I looked at each other and just laughed. All I could say was "I'm sorry I accidently gave away our cookies." He was pretty understanding, especially since I got the recipe and am making him a batch today. :)