Always Thinking Ahead

The other day as my wife was talking to the kids about babies my 5 year old boy pipes up and asks

So, mom, when I get a woman will babies come out of her tummy too?

Yes, son they will

....Cool

I love the simplicity of their lives.

A Taste Of Shanghai Nightlife??(lol)

Check this story out for a few laughs and insights.
Enjoy.

Been So Long

Man it has been too long since I wrote any poetry. In my backyard of computer files I found a few gems I will share with you. I do this in the hope that I will refresh my memory and intice yours.

Know Fear

I know no greater fear

A flashlight is all it took
To break the will of my flesh
It spilled the raw truth
In the luminous red glow
Between my fingers

I am a story of blood,
Opaque flesh, obscuring bone
Yet I have met a man
With no hands
And so much to tell

I know no greater fear

My eyes peer from caves,
Tethered lest they fall
Lest they fail
To tell my ears
What they are hearing

I am a story told
Through sights and sounds
Yet I have seen a woman
Deaf and blind
And so much to tell

I know no greater fear

I have seen injustices
And shed no tears
I have felt a hand
Touch my brow
I have felt the cold

Am I a story
Of spirit written on flesh
Yet I see a man
Reflected back to me
With nothing to say

I know no greater fear



My Faith

Faith awoke this morning
Lying languidly in my bed
Stretching up, around and out
Rising fluidly to her day
I followed her with a glance
This my pure bride
Faith, the one flesh so joined
Beyond mere poetic approximations
Pain upon pain in her grief is mine
Joys equally so, rushing
Across both as stones
In the bed of one summer stream
Faith from birth, faith my guide
Faith my mute muse
Faith my coin in these streets
Faith I have sold
Faith my whore
She begs with her eyes
Searching the blindness of mine
While I palm the drug
While I dance in a trance
While I embrace wanton flesh
While I place my mind
Upon throne and dais
While I heap high fortunes
Faith begs no more
Faith yearns upon my eyes
To search the skies
To note their endless prose
Faith yearns upon my skin
To know the earth’s touch
To feel her pains of labour
Faith yearns upon my ears
To hear the applause of leaves
In the passing breeze
Faith yearns upon my heart
In the streets where I sell her
Faith yearns upon my heart
In the halls where her beauty
Buys me praise
Faith yearns upon my heart
In the passing of my life
Faith yearns
To know the touch
Of a little spittle
And some moist clay.


Satiation


How deep and endless, from my eyes,
Does the gulf of my indigence appear.
And here I find Your great wonder,
The unsearchable fullness of Your giving
Beyond all that my eye can see
Or yet that my want may want;
And when perchance You step within the clouds
Then endless still is the well
Where Your memory dwells
Here I drink of the faith birthed in times of sight
Only to find this faith
Is a harbour in the sea of Your faithfulness
For You gave in time to give against the time
Of all my want.

(March 21,2003)

Is That Coffee I Smell???

This morning my wife pointed out a very lucid letter to the editor (title: Cheaper to buy a house in Penticton than it is to rent one in Kelowna ) which should be a wake up call for the community we live in. The wake up is the alarmingly fast growth of the separation between the rich and poor here in Kelowna. Soaring housing prices and rental costs are driving the work force away from the wealthy they are supposed to be here to serve. Every year we watch as a new housing development goes up on yet another hillside overlooking the town (no I will not call it a city). It is truly becoming an overgrown resort community with an underdeveloped service network. The astounding thing is that people will cock their head and stare in wonder when you mention people moving away because 'How could they not want to live here??' Wrong question really. It should be 'How could they not afford to live here??'
The link in the title of this post will take you to the letter that Dawn Weber wrote to the Capital News in Kelowna and there you will read about the skilled trades in another town like this one who were priced right out of the town they were building. I just happen to be a skilled tradesmen here in Kelowna and I am making pretty decent cash. The fact is though that I am still scraping by. My wife also babysits five days a week to supplement our income and at the end of each month we find that we have lived, but we have yet to save. To put it into perspective I found a site through a friend that puts your income into your place in the world population. I found that I am at #424,629,412 in the whole world for income. With the world population being estimated at 6,525,825,813 some simple math tells me that I am in the top 7% of the world's wealthy. So it begs the question of what percentile you have to be in to make it a sensible option to move here. If you are considering it, please do your math.

Loving Google Earth

Well, it is official now, the world is way too freakin' small. This site proves that point. I mean, I can scroll around the world in seconds and see you sipping your morning coffee in your pj's.....oops.. maybe I'll just zoom back out a bit. By the way, nice hair, bud.
We have really enjoyed checking this program out and finding many cool sights and places. Of course the familiar places draw us the most. For example we actually found the apartment that we lived in when we were in Shanghai.

The thing that astounded me about this satellite view is how barren this area was. The photo above must be in the late ninties or 2000 at the latest. The following photos are from a video I took from the roof of the apartment building we were working on at the corner of Guyang Lu and Gubei Nan Lu. You can see there has been a huge change in just a few years.

This would be looking towards the top of the Google Earth pic. It is looking up Gubei Nan Lu.

This is looking to the left of the GE pic. Note the ever present tower cranes, a constant fixture on the Shanghai skyline.

This is looking to the right close to the top of the GE pic.

And this is looking down the street just left of the middle of the GE pic that runs from the top of the pic to the bottom. That is Guyang Lu where I walked to work every day. As you can see it has changed quite a bit.

Of Course I'm Gonna See This...

AND FANS GO HERE FOR MORE GREAT STUFF

My Mistake

Well once again I did not do quite enough research.
The last post about the size of Shanghai was slightly inaccurate because the figure of 6300 square kilometers covers the whole municipality of Shanghai and not just the mostly urban areas of the city. For instance there is a long drive from the Puxi side of the Huangpu to the international airport at Pudong, but most of it is agricultural once you get out of the industrial area south of Jinqiao. We are not familiar with the northern part of the city but it may be similar. The outskirts are where you are finding more of the single family dwellings rather than the multistory buildings further into the core.
Anyway the long and short of it is that the urban area is roughly 2057 square kms.
So with this in mind we find these results as follows:
Shanghai's urban area is 14.28 times larger than Saskatoon's (for my Sask wife :) )
Shanghai is actually 18.04 times bigger than Vancouver (no this does not include Delta, Richmond, North Van, blah blah blah)
Shanghai's urban area is smaller than Vancouver metropolitan area, but with 3 times denser a population. (It sure did not look this way flying over it. It just went on and on while Vancouver seemed small by comparison. That's web stats for ya)
I could go on, but you get the picture......right??

Big Enough I Guess

Cris was wondering today exactly how big Shanghai, China is and so I found the Wikipedia site which says that it covers roughly 6300 square kilometers. This did not quite do it though because it gave no real reference. So we did some calculations and compared it to an area in Saskatchewan. First off we found that it actually covers substantially more area than Prince Albert National Park, but this also didn't do it. So think of this the next time you drive from Saskatoon to Duck Lake, when you arrive you will have just traveled across the city of Shanghai. The distance of 88 kilometers would represent the diameter of Shanghai if it were in a perfect circle.
Hmmm
Being from B.C. myself I had to find that it would also be like (well somewhat considering the curviness of the roads compared to the big SK). So from downtown Vancouver start driving and go till you get somewhere around the Vedder Bridge (Wow, eh Ma). Or go as the crow flies from Penticton to Vernon.
Cool.
Thought y'all might be interested.

The Dangers Of Mixed Marriages...:)

My wife showed me this after she had been checking out a Shanghai expat community blog.LOL.

The Beat(ting) Goes On

So it continues unabated in China. The PSB (Public Security Bureau) breaks up a meeting of our brothers and sisters and drags them off to detention, prison and torture. We don't hear much about this in the flood of news stories coming from mainland China. The economic boom and rising power of the awakened 'Dragon' makes up the bulk of the front pages, not the daily plight of Christians and others seeking religious freedom under an atheistic government.

The interesting thing this time is that there were Americans detained and interrogated as well. Perhaps this will bring the suffering into sharper focus for us.
The daily challenge to faith in China is markedly different from here and it isn't. In their case they must try to avoid detection by hostile forces and we must try to be detected by largely apathetic forces. In this we differ, but in the sense of conflict we do not. We are all under attack in this world, whether it is the sinister anesthetic gas attacks of the spirit we deal with here or the heavy blows of electrified police batons there.
Please join us in praying for our brothers and sisters who suffer abroad in conditions we do not understand. Please join us in praying for the leaders of China that their eyes would be open to the light of Christ. Pray for President Hu Jin Tao as he visits the U.S. on a trade mission that he would be confronted with these injustices by the right voices.
Please pray for China.