8-5-05
I love Newsboys. Such great words and good music.

I also love my new ipod. Yep, I have an ipod! 20 gigs baby! Yes, I am happy! Got it on ebay for $230. Not bad.

Kuyu is gone now. He left on Friday morning. What a hoot having him over! Me and Bonnie took him to Oklahoma City to the Cowboy Museum and Frontier City. That was really fun. The roller coasters weren't really the greatest, but I enjoyed it. They have a ride called The Eruption that is something else. I liked that one a lot.

Anna bought herself a nice digital camera just before I left for Taiwan. But she pretty much spent everything she could on the camera, and so has been living with a 16 MB picture card for the past six months! Poor girl! So I got her a 256MB card for her birthday. She's going nuts taking pictures now.

Dude, I'm loving being home with my family. But man do I miss Kinmen! I miss hearing Chinese, I miss EasyWay, I miss going to Small Kinmen (that place rocks), I miss going to Monkey's for supper, I miss my teammates...

Thursday night we stayed up all night. Kuyu had to leave at 4:30 Friday morning, and Mom, Dad, Isaac and Caleb have all gone up to Chicago for a wedding, so we just stayed up and watched movies! We watched Ice Princess. That was interesting. Don't think too hard and accept that you can see right through the plot and it's a fun, mindless watch. Having been in gymnastics, I've seen a lot of girls pushed the same ways as the skaters in the movie.

Random note: Even though his Chinese is so marble mouthed I can hardly understand a word of what he says, I love listening to music by Jay.

Then we watched part of Fat Albert. It had some pretty funny parts in it. But we didn't finish it because it was getting late into the night and we wanted time to watch Con Air.

I had seen the end of Con Air in Kinmen on TV and thought it looked like a really cool movie. So we watched the whole thing. Very cool movie! Not something I want the little kids to see, but I think Mom would like it. I just think the ending with running into all the casino's in LA was a bit over the top. And while I don't normally approve of face smashing, I really liked the part where the main character smashes the rapist's face into the wall. You have to have seen the movie to understand. It was totally deserved.

8-14

Ok, this has been sitting in drafts waiting for me to finish it...I guess I should.

Today I talked to the church for evening service. Showed pictures and basically talked about what's going on in Kinmen. I think it went pretty well, although I was stuck standing behind the pulpit: if I moved then the speakers would start screaming. I really like moving around while talking to a group, so it made me a little nervous to just be standing there talking. Still, they seemed to like it and I covered most of what I wanted to (I only had twenty minutes...although I think I may have run over and done about thirty without realizing it).

Man, life callings are difficult things. I'm really wondering about some things that I feel like God has called me to that seem to conflict with each other. When I was ten years old I felt God call me to make movies. It was a very strong call and I've had that goal in mind for years and years. But between Feb 5th and Feb. 7th (I even know the exact date) that goal was been shaken. God placed Kinmen on my heart. It's not something I can describe or explain, but God gave me a supernatural love for that place. I can't seem myself going anywhere else.

I know I need to be there for this next school year. Will God lift the burden after that and will I move on to something else? I don't know. But I don't think so. So now I'm starting to look into staying in Kinmen on a more long time basis. I'll need a 4 year degree (which I can probably get in three years with hard work) and then I can go back and live in Kinmen (instead of being on a six month visitor visa and not really being a teacher). That means I need to start work on this college stuff soon.

What would be really cool is if BJ and I end up living and working together in Kinmen.

Ok, I'm going to get this posted and get ready to leave for karate. I'm going to be testing for my brown belt in two weeks! Yikes!