Of Pots and Planes

Fancy and frilly? No. Gluten and chocolate-free? Yes!

Breads, cookies, icing, peppermint bark, soup, mashed potato bakes, salads...the list goes on. Christmas felt like it was spent in the kitchen. Spent lugging hot water in from my bathroom for load after load of dishes. Spent coaxing my little toaster oven not to burn things. Spent cussing at the altitude and wondering why my special alt. adjustments seemed to be doing no help. This wasn't the entire theme of Christmas, but an overriding one. It's not one I particularly sought out, but it seems to happen to me over here. Maybe if I was state-side the exact same thing would happen (except that I would be able to bake more than 6 cookies at a time...I have honestly never done that before). I want to learn hospitality, I want people to feel welcome in my home, I want to feed them good food...but I also wish it could come naturally, or perhaps at least with hot water in the kitchen.

Mischievous Murray was the undoing of more than one bow this Christmas.

And now I have spent the last week teaching/testing/grading/surviving to make it to tomorrow - travel day. One of those special days where I take my life and wing it half way around the world to live somewhere else for a couple months and then do it again. There are a thousand things to take care of first and my tummy rolls with nervousness. Rationality goes out the window and my mind begins to process the irrational as highly plausible. Thoughts this week:

- What if security checks take away something precious...like hand lotion or eye liner or my paperback novel?
- What if my cat is sad and misses me and decides to express his feelings by sharpening his claws on my student's purple sofa?
- What if there's another accident on the way to the airport and I miss my Lhasa flight again?
- What if I am stuck between two people with dog carriers again for 14 hours?
- What if there's a new rule about no hot-pink carry-on bags and I don't learn this until I get to customs and border protection?
- What if JFK is scary and frightening and gets another snowstorm?
- What if go to the bathroom early in the flight and then the seat-belt light gets turned on and when I come out of the bathroom the flight attendant yells at me to sit down and then spends the rest of the flight being angry at me when she really has no idea how much I love rules and love following them and was trying to return to my seat as quickly as possible?

All of yesterday's flights out of Lhasa were canceled due to dust storms. This makes my stomach sink. The blue skies today lift my stomach a little, but not by much.

I am praying about the whole thing and I'm sure everything will go okay, but crap happens to wonderful, God-fearing Christians all the time - much better people than me. There's no third book of Corinthians with affirmations about smooth airline travel. And yet, the turbulence has never bothered me. The thought of crashing is not so bad - yay Father, I'm coming home! It's the little logistics that the enemy uses to wear me down.

There's a small pill that I take a few times a year on travel days. I love that little pill...and I hate it. It makes me feel weak. Why can't I make it smoothly and successfully 8,000 miles around the world with simple faith in the One who will carry me through? What chemical imbalance is going on in my brain that I can't get away from that pill? Things are simply calmer and happier with the pill, and without it, they are not. I think I'll blame this chemical imbalance on the fall of man and entry of sin into the world. Thanks a lot Adam. Not only did you bring down the whole human race but now homeland security makes me want to vomit with nervousness. Praise the Father that he loves us so much that he sacrificed his Son for the whole fate of mankind issue, but in the meantime I am left wondering which airport scanners my belt buckle will set off.