Happy Thanksgiving!

It’s midnight on Wednesday night so here in China it’s Thanksgiving Day! We’ve been teaching in our classes this week about the first Thanksgiving Day. I’ve been encouraged at how God-centered that first Thanksgiving Day really was. You can read the story at this link. http://www.holidays.net/thanksgiving/pilgrims.htm

When I asked my students what Americans do on Thanksgiving Day, the number one answer was “Eat turkey!” One girl said, “Eat chicken.” That made everyone laugh! She quickly realized her mistake. The other answers students gave were, “Get together with family”, “Go to church”, and, “Pray.”

We have many special things planned to celebrate. We have to teach, so Thursday evening we will have a special dinner with our “Fellowship.” You see, on Wednesday evenings we have Fellowship with all the other “foreign” Brothers and Sisters in Huangshi. It is our family, Jesse & Sam (brother & sis-in-law), Krista & Sally (our teammates who teach at the jr. high), Hannah & Becca (cousins who teach at the university), and John (an international student at the university from Nigeria). The nine of us meet regularly in our home to worship as Jesse plays the guitar, listen to an online sermon or someone shares from the Word, and share prayer requests and pray together. It’s very encouraging for all of us. We plan to have a special dinner together of KFC fried chicken, mashed potatoes, stuffing that my mom sent, and some other goodies.

Friday we’ll enjoy decorating our home for Christmas. I just couldn’t stand it any longer, and I already started playing the Christmas music. Sophia’s extremely excited about setting up her nativity on Friday. Then Friday evening we’ll go have dinner at Jessica, Franklin, and Rui Rui’s home.

Saturday the rest of our Zhong Relations teammates who live in Wuhan will come to Huangshi and we’ll feast together Saturday afternoon. Last Friday our family was in Wuhan for a meeting, so we also planned to buy a turkey. One store imports turkeys at Thanksgiving time. However, we were told that the turkeys wouldn’t be in until Wednesday! Oh no! Thankfully, the Lord helped us! On the way to the store we stopped by the Aloha Diner which is owned by our American Sister. They told us of the turkey dilemma and then sold us one of theirs that they received from their food suppliers! We were so blessed!! On a side note, we were told that a turkey in Shanghai costs $100. We got ours for around $40!

The other dilemma though is that Chinese people only fry their food in woks. They never bake, and in fact no one has an oven. We only have a toaster oven, so we needed to figure out where to bake our turkey. Once again our dear Jessica came through for us. She’s arranged for us to take our turkey to a local restaurant and they will bake it for us. I plan to prepare it first, otherwise it would end up being basted with soy sauce and vinegar – not kidding!

Well, I’ll give a full report after the weekend is over. Our hearts are truly overflowing with joy and thankfulness this season. We are blessed with abundant Life because of our awesome Savior!