Blue Sky and Blossoms, GeojedoThere have been a lot of changes going around here in the past little while! Spring is just around the corner, and has been teasing us with some gorgeous weather and warm winds that make you want to skip alongside the schoolchildren, then immediately crushing your spirits with the wicked cold days that follow. If you are not carefully monitoring the weather forecast, this means you might get caught in a rainstorm without a jacket, or find yourself overdressed on a milder day, stripping off layers as the afternoon progresses. And on more than one occasion I have found myself powerwalking to get home from work, shoulders hunched against the cutting wind, and sockless feet frozen for being silly enough to be hopefully underdressed on a winter's day! But the plants and trees seem not to have been fooled... they know for certain spring is coming and some of them have even dared to blossom! I took this photo on the way home from church last weekend; stunning white blossoms against a blue sky. The month of March is also the start of a new school year in Korea, so back-to-school specials are on sale at the local department store, and kids are sporting new haircuts, new shoes, and uniforms, with great anticipation and excitement for new classmates and schools and teachers. I finished up evaluations for my former students last month, and said hello to a whole new crew of children this week, with only a few familiar faces. We have also had a big staff turnover at work, with three of the foreign English teachers finishing up their one-year contracts, and three new ones arriving to take their place. And we have a new Korean teacher as well! So I've been busying myself with farewells and welcome dinners, class introductions, and getting acquainted with some new curriculum. Other changes have been a bit more subtle... like the grey hairs I've been finding on my head! (No jokes.) Or more importantly, the times where I've recognized a change within myself, in thought or in attitude. Often, I'll discover these things in conversation or community with other people, but each time I'm made aware of it, it blows my mind to see this internal evidence, this life-changing power that the grace and love of Jesus is making in me. I know I still have so much to learn, but it amazes me to encounter these signs of spring within, or to observe them in my friends. I love the scene in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe when Aslan breathes life back into the stone statues that the White Witch has frozen in her courtyard. I feel like that gradual, gentle, warmth that eventually flows into all parts and restores to life what once was dead and cold is really truly happening in me. And in many people around me. I know that sometimes we experience what feels like a wintertime or a desert place along our life's journeys, but isn't it a beautiful promise, this hope of eternal Spring? "We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, inwardly we are being renewed day by day!" (2 Cor. 4:16) Oh, that He would look at me and see, His image reflecting back at Him through me...
Blue Sky and Blossoms, Geojedo
Yesterday was "Daeboreum" (or Great Full Moon), the Korean celebration of the first full moon in the Lunar New Year calendar. Several of my students asked me if I had eaten ogokbap for breakfast, which is a five-grain rice mixture. Other traditions on this day include cracking nuts with your teeth, which is thought to keep your teeth healthy all year. Or climbing nearby mountains, in order to catch the moonrise... which is said to give you good luck all year, if you're the first person to see it. Fun and games.
When it rains, the street vendors, who sell everything from fruit and fish to toothbrushes and slippers, open up these giant rainbow umbrellas that remind me of summer at the beach in North Carolina. They sit beneath them, amidst their wares, chatting with their neighboring vendors, as the deluge pours down. I pass them on my way to and from work. The rainy day commute can be quite dangerous at times! Being a good head-and-a-half taller than the majority of the Koreans I meet, it seems my eyes are directly aligned with the pointed edges of their umbrellas, which fill the streets in a colorful pedestrian rainbow. I have suffered, on one such occasion, a tiny slice on my cheek, just below my eye, from the clawing edge of a pink-and-white Hello Kitty rainshield. And as umbrellas have a way of obscuring vision, both of the carrier and the raincoat-wearing individual, my walk to work involves more than the usual share of bumping and jostling, I have to duck and dodge as well!
