Wild Mountainside Honey

Ruth Anne: Hot, hot days continue. We saw Tutu last night and she told me that the temperatures have broken 30 year old records. Even the Thais can't believe how hot it is. A thunder roll becomes a welcome herald of something cooler to come.

The heat both curtails our activities and enhances the possibility of experiencing the quiet, spontaneous delights of Hot Springs life.

It tempts heat-related illness to go out on any excursions, and so these past few days have found us pretty much stationed right here at Hot Springs. That evolves into something of a pattern where we are up for 5:30 devotions, have breakfast and then hang out under the dining shelter with the kids playing games until first nap at 10. From there it's pretty much an alternating nap, eat, play scenario until evening devotions and bed.

Friday was like that. Too hot for anything. Except at one point Suradet and Moo, the husband of Suradet's sister, took off up the hill into the jungle with a cooler and a machete. They returned about an hour later and Suradet came to show us what they'd gone for.

Wild honeycombs, with a few rather unimpressed jungle bees, sat is glorious gooeyness on the bottom. Within 10 minutes Suradet had extracted the honey into a bowl and an impromptu snack of bread and honey happened before our eyes.

It's hard even for me to explain why this delights me so much. If you know me, you know that I love honey. My personal blog (which I cannot access from here) is called "Bread and Honey" partly because I love honey and partly because of the Biblical metaphors of sustenance and nurture represented by both those foods. To have that played out in such a wild and unexpected way seemed a very personal gift.

Suradet wouldn't have known. But God does. And as I let the sweet jungle treasure play in my mouth, my soul was touched in ways unexplainable.

"How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!" Psalm 119:103

As I write, it is Sunday afternoon. We have already had our morning worship. I preached through an interpretor on Haggai 2:4-9 on God's desire to bring us peace. We had Communion together. We prayed together. And all throughout there was a powerful sense of God's power and goodness. How sweet it all is to my soul.

Tonight we will go to a different night market that's only open on Sunday night. It's within the "Old City" so this should be interesting.

Tomorrow we will stay to see the kids off to school. Then we will pack up from here and leave to spend our last night at Mike and Debbie's before getting on the plane Tuesday afternoon.

I am finding it harder each time I come, to approach the goodbye. Yupa and I already had a private cry together, each of us murmering words of deep affection and sorrow of separation in our own language, words not understood by our ears, but our hearts comprending fully.

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