Held

Yes I feel rather piggish, you know lazy, greedy….though not half as intelligent as the pink (or beige, or brown, or black) creatures are supposed to be.

Par example, (and btw that’s one of the few phrases I consistently catch while listening to French radio in my desperation to help myself with the French listening test that’s coming up! anyway..), I just gobbled down a slice of the most delicious Bombe au Chocolate from Le Pain Quotidien thanks to my wonderful housemate who da-pao-ed it for me. First tasted it in the charming rue Mouffetard branch in Paris, and was very glad to find out that they have branches in London too! (Marylebone, Kensington and Royal Festival Hall if you’re interested.)

So, now it looks like I just had a chocolate dinner! That after my chocolate cereal breakfast and my honey-lemon pancake lunch! Which is especially bad because I haven’t been exercising, or leading a “healthy lifestyle” of sufficient rest, nutrients and all the rest of it. “Règles pour vivre en bonne santé”, something we recently read in class, to learn l’impératif and vocab I think, but anyway, I violate most of the rules quite thoroughly, like “faire du sport deux fois par semaine” (yes I find it hard to manage exercise twice a week), or “dormir 7 heures par nuit”, and most definitely not “manger du poisson une fois par semaine” since I stopped buying salmon.

But, I have also adopted a new non-piggish habit: of climbing and squeezing past this particular set of gates to get to my school library each Sunday. Rather monkey-like really, and very un-glamarous, but beats wasting ten minutes to walk all the way round the compound to the only open entrance. (haha, ying can be zebra/flamingo-like, I can be pig/monkey-like!) Why they cannot open the pedestrian gate I really do not understand! Especially since there is a guardhouse there, and the guard sitting there must see me and many others walk pass, AND must know we’re climbing through the gates since there’s nowhere else to go once we pass them by. AND they always grin slightly as if they know what I’ve just done when I pass them again on my way out. Hmph. So, they could very well watch for suspicious persons walking in nicely and lady-like through the gate if they are watching for suspicious persons walking past to clamber up and squeeze through right? If I see them again next week, I think I shall ask why.

It’s been a funny weekend. Yesterday morning, the little girls in my class were happily filling in their worksheet and colouring, when one of them suddenly asked, “Are you married?” I must have reacted with disproportionate horror, because another one quickly said, “But you’re older, you’re grown up, we thought, you CAN be married!” And then the littlest of them, just six, comes running over to announce very excitedly, “My friend, she’s got 16 boyfriends!” But she did try to reassure me when I asked how old she was. “I’m 6, but my friend, she’s 8!” It’s so funny, even if possibly slightly worrying, they live in such a different world from the one I grew up in. I shall remember these moments and not the rest when I think of those children and the school.

—

We all find it hard right, to understand why people supposedly walking in the light still flail frantically as though in darkness. All too often, I cannot understand myself, and that plank in my eye, blocking out much in my own line of vision, somehow magnifies the speck of sawdust in my brother’s. It takes much to remember that “partners in the gospel” (Phil1:3:5) are always works-in-progress, not a single one has “arrived”, not till the day of Christ.

So, as we sang in church:

“We turn to Christ amid our fear and failing,
the will that lacks the courage to be free,
the weary labours, all but unavailing,
to bring us nearer to what a church should be. “

“We turn to Christ from all our restless striving,
unnumbered voices with a single prayer -
the living water for our souls’ reviving,
in Christ to live, and love and serve and care.”

We turn to Christ.