Joeletter 7.1

The Joeletter

Wow, Joeletter 7.1! It's amazing that I've been in Deeper for seven months now. God has been so good to me, and gently taught me so much. Like I've said, this is exactly where God wanted me to be this year.

Yesterday, Sunday evening, I was again able to play floor-ball with the guys. I'm just slightly better than I was last week, but not enough to make a whole lot of difference. But it's fun, and the best part of being able to play with these guys is not the winning. It's about being able to respond to God, seeking intimacy with Him, while being around other people. That's a big theme that God is teaching me with right now. It's about taking each thought, whether my own thoughts or others thoughts, and seeing what God has to say about it. Pursuing Him is that simple, walking each thought and action back to Him. It means a little bit of thinking. But it's so freeing. We are freed to simply do whatever it takes to be intimate with God. Making Him the one thing, the only thing that I act upon.

Oatmeal-making is going much better, thanks for your help. I made a simply wonderful bowl last week, with a dollop of honey to spice it up. I'm also enjoying making spaghetti for breakfast. I have to eat it plain, though, because the spaghetti sauce is very sweet over here, and doesn't taste right. I just found some flavoring that I put in this morning's spaghetti, kind of like chicken bullion. I liked that a lot.

I am trying to like tea. Tea and coffee are a fairly big part of this culture, enough so that they sell pitchers that plug into the wall and heat water to boiling in less than a minute. And it makes sense, because it's very cold here. It helps to have something hot/warm to drink. I just want my drink to actually taste like something! I'm too the point that I can stand tea. It smells really good, but the taste always lets me down. I like hot cups of water, though. I just skip the tea step, and go straight for the hot water. It works out pretty well.

So yogurt is a big thing here also. There is a huge selection at every grocery store. And it's none of this fat-free stuff. Here, they make yogurt with real cream! It tastes great, though it takes a little bit of getting used to the texture at first. But in my yogurt purchasing experiences here, I have learned a little caution. You should always look very carefully at the pictures on the little cups of yogurt. If I could read Czech it probably wouldn't be so bad. But, not reading, I must rely on the pictures. And I've purchased some pretty crazy yogurt by not looking.

The first weird one was from Yoplait. I saw cherries on the outside of the cup, and thought, "Oh, I like cherries. I'll get this one." It was also fairly cheap, and I'm always looking for cheap things. I got it out to eat as part of breakfast, and decided not to stir it up. I just left the cherry stuff on the bottom to eat last. As I got down to the color/flavoring, I noticed that in addition to red there seemed to be some brown. I just assumed that the red was so concentrated that it looked brown. Then I started tasting something that really didn't taste like cherry, though there was some of that in there too. I had to think a minute, and looked again at the outside of the cup. Upon this second inspection, I discovered a second crucial picture behind the picture of the cherries. It was a chocolate and cherry yogurt cup! I finished it, but vowed to always look very carefully at the pictures to see what I was actually getting.

All was fine for a few days, mainly because I didn't have a chance to purchase any more yogurt. Oh, and it's not spelled yogurt here. It's jogurty, or jogobella. I'm staying away from the jogobella for a while, though. That's what I bought yesterday. It was the cheapest yogurt on the shelf. One was strawberry flavored, and the other grape flavored. I had never had grape yogurt, so I thought that would be fun to try.

I opened up the cup, and stirred it up. I saw little....things in the yogurt, but that was fine. Almost all flavored yogurts have stuff in them; it makes them better. I took a bite, and found two things out. One, grape flavored yogurt is pretty good. It had little bits of actual grapes in the yogurt, slightly squishy. The other thing I found, though, wasn't quite as exciting. Once again I took a second, closer look at the outside of the cup. Surrounding the grapes on the outside was a picture of wheat stalks. I had just assumed that it as decoration, as usual. In reality, there were small wheat berries in the yogurt! It was hilarious. I would swallow the spoonful of yogurt, and then chew on these moist kernels of wheat. But as fun as it was, it's something you only want to do sparingly. Like I said, I'm going to be avoiding Jogobella for a while, and looking even more carefully at what the pictures have in them.

It's really funny to think about all of you right now. I'm six hours ahead of Eastern time. So when I'm eating lunch, you all are getting up. At supper, it's only lunch time for you. And I'm going to bed about your supper time. It's so funny to think about.

Thank you for your continued prayers that I will be able to see God's perspective in each thought, action, and plan. I am learning so much. And besides that, I'm having a blast!

In His Time,