Hi all! I'm on the cusp of finally getting to go to Korea, which is uber exciting. The past week here has been rather hectic and completely irregular thanks to the quarantine and swine flu going around. Half of my district has been sick and hasn't come to class, which makes it difficult for us to all be on the same page as far as Korean and whatnot. Apparently in quarantine the elders watched the movie Legacy 8 times and in several languages. They got to sleep whenever they wanted...which means that things basically melted down for most missionaries. Fortunately, the elders still tried to be obedient. They're good nineteen-year-olds, that's for certain. Most in a similar situation would probably go insane. Which would be bad. I don't like seeing people go crazy. I had hoped to be patient zero with the swine flu, but unfortunately...no such luck. Drat. I'll have to start a pandemic later. (Just kidding.)

Oh. I just remembered what it was I wanted to talk about in this blog post. I call it the Parable of Shenzhen.As many of you are aware (especially if you've read my blog), I spent four months in China teaching English at an offshoot of Xiangtan University in Xiangtan, Hunan Province, China. It was pretty much awesome. I loved being immersed in a different culture (which is why I'm excited to go to Korea) and seeing the history of the other side of the world. I didn't really want to go home--the only reason I did is because my Mom and Kathy decided to pick us up in Hong Kong. I would love to still be there. Although, I am more excited to actually be able to speak the language of another people in Korea...

Anyway (I've been going off on tangents a lot lately), at the end of our stay in China, Lany arranged for us to take a train to Hong Kong to meet up with Mom and Kathy. It would've been really expensive for us to fly, and Jeff and I were okay with taking a train. It was actually pretty fun. We had beds. And lots of Beijing nougat (which I really miss, by the way) to eat. We slept most of the way. It wasn't as noisy or as smelly as the train to Beijing was, and it didn't take as long. Our train ride from Xiangtan ended at Shenzhen.

Now, I had googled Shenzhen when I'd learned we were going to be visiting there, just so I could figure things out. I'd also googled Hong Kong's subway system to figure out where we needed to get off and find a taxi (sadly, my research wasn't thorough enough). I was so excited and terribly nervous...because I couldn't find out how we were supposed to go from Shenzhen to Hong Kong anywhere online.

Jeff and I arrived in Shenzhen and then proceeded to the ticket office in order to purchase a ticket to Hong Kong. After waiting for nearly an hour in the wrong line and then an hour in the right line where they told me they could get us to go through Guangzhou (which was about three hours away) into Hong Kong, I was confused. We didn't have enough money for the tickets, and the ATM in the train station didn't actually work. So, Jeff and I lugged our heavy bags behind us and then set out on a journey around Shenzhen to find an ATM.

I had always thought that I was a really patient person before this experience. I mean, I've got five brothers after all. (Not that they made me endure anything, really.) I found out in a hurry that I'm not. As we started pulling our luggage down the street toward something that looked like a promising area for an ATM, I was panicking. Now, you might wonder why I seem to think panicking and patience are related. Well, when we're patient, we trust that God will provide a way for things to happen. I wasn't trusting God. All I could think about was that we didn't have cell phones, we couldn't get in contact with Mom because she wouldn't be checking her email, and she was probably already thinking we were dead or something. I'd given her a rough estimation as to when we would be coming, and I was certain we wouldn't make it. We couldn't speak Chinese, and our Chinese friends were all the way back in Xiangtan. We'd had to turn our cell phones in, and had no way of remembering any of the numbers.

So, yeah. I was panicking. I felt like crying. I hardly ever feel like crying, but I felt like crying. I looked at Jeff and I said, "What are we going to do? We have no way to...yada yada yada."

He looked at me calmly for a second and smiled. "Erica, it's okay. We'll be alright. Somehow we'll be able to find the train station. We can go to an internet bar and email mom and can find a hostel or something. Let's just try to find out where we need to go. Shenzhen is right next to Hong Kong. There has to be a way."

I have never felt so humble in my life. My little brother had more patience than I did. His reassurance calmed my soul considerably. I didn't start crying, and we proceeded to find an ATM.

I figured that there was probably another train station in Shenzhen we needed to get to, so we tried to communicate to a taxi driver that we wanted to go to the other train station by showing him our tickets. He didn't understand us...and gave us a ride back to the other train station, which was nice. My arm was very sore from pulling nearly 50 pounds behind me over rough terrain (there was construction going on).

Jeff stood in line this time, and the very nice lady at the train station who hadn't understood me before understood him. She wrote the address to the other train station down on a piece of paper. We hailed a taxi, and went off.

We found Hong Kong. We were smelly and sweaty and tired when we came to the Mariott (which is a lot like heaven when you've had a miserable day) and were reunited with our family.

So there you have my parable. :)

I hope you have a wonderful day! Remember that God loves you very much, and that He does answer prayers if we have patience and are humble. Life is hard, but it is possible.

Sister Oates