…
The clocks in our hotel rooms don’t work. Its only fitting for this place. The store fronts are all closed, every one of them; and despite the crowded streets full of motorbikes with anywhere from 1 person to 6 people on them, this place feels like a ghost town. A rather large town or even small city robbed by the Tet holiday of the business that makes it alive. On the more residential streets the store fronts double as the living room for most families. In most homes we walk past, its either karaoke or techno that plays so loudly its shared by the surrounding neighbors. The techno I don’t much mind, but the karaoke is a sound to shred the eardrums out of anyone, but fun in the same sense!
The restaurants here don’t flaunt western dishes on podiums out in front of their doors like they do in Ho Chi Minh. In fact its rare to find a hint of western food in this town. There’s a place that has a picture of french fries on the menu hanging on the wall. Nathan and I sit down and somehow we’ve ordered, Nathan pointed to the fries. We’re brought pretty descent sandwiches of fried chicken, cucumbers, mayonnaise, and some sort of chili sauce. A plate of crispy looking fried potatoes comes out. They taste more like fried caramelized taro, but not bad. The two girls at the table next to us are eating baked looking fried chicken. It looks good. We’re done. We eat here because all the prices are on the menu, we can’t get cheated like we do at some of the other places. We pay. We leave. We pass our girls on the way out.
Nathan and I get back to the hotel. We walk through the kitchen to get to the stairs because for some reason, that’s where they are. Elevators are for people who can’t climb stairs. The kitchen is always dark and there is never anyone in it. Its one you
would see in a horror movie; big black counter tops with a few holes in
it where the gas burners are put, the propane tank sits near by because
here, no one ever cares how close it is to the flame; the back left corner is too dark to see into and the one white
tiled island has the same meat cleaver sitting on the same sectioned off
tree trunk cutting board that’s far beyond saturated with who knows
what type of animal blood, for as long as we’ve been here.
The air in our room is clammy, and the tile floors in the bathroom are still damp from the shower the night before. The air circulation in this place is terrible. We open the window. We’re on the 4th floor of the hotel, we shouldn’t be able to open the window. Things I never really thought about tend to stick out to me now. The stairs in the kitchen, the window, the fact that there hasn’t been a shower curtain on any shower I’ve taken in the past 6 months. Its the accumulation of all the small differences that makes everywhere different from everywhere.
What are we supposed to do in this place? We don’t speak Vietnamese and there aren’t any churches here. Our girls come back to the hotel. They said they’ve met some people. We’ve been invited to celebrate Tet with the two girls eating chicken at the table that was next to us. They invite their friends and suddenly we’re out with about 8 Vietnamese girls in the city center with hundreds of other people to celebrate the new year.
Time and time again without fail and with no analogy that I can come up with does God provided for us. For the next few days we spend most of our time with these girls. We eat in their homes with their families and we ride on the back of their motorbikes to pagodas where traditionally people go to pray and offer money for luck for the new year. We sit down and have tea with monks and share with them what we are doing around the world. People are giving money as a selfless act to gain favor with god and so they will blessed with luck and money for the next year. I was told it is always important to be selfless and to pray and do good things for others, but only to the end so that I can have it for myself (karma, in one aspect). But if Im only doing those things for others so that I can get it in return, isn’t that selfish? Everything breaks down at some point or another, except of course the teachings of Jesus, because it has nothing to do with humans who can mess it up, except that we are only to be on the receiving end of God. Everyone in this entire world will be either an object of God’s wrath, or an object of his mercy, but that is all we are, an object for the purpose of Gods glory and nothing else, and oh how sweet it is in his mercy; not that we have to do anything at all, only accept the gift of Christ and out of the Love that we are shown in him, do we love, and express that love for others. Because I am loved, I love. Because Love knows me and is in me, I am able to search Love and know Love and trust Love and lean on Love and nothing else, and therefore be satisfied in Him and nothing else, so that He is most glorified at my satisfaction.
