Great Shakes!

At the Everyone Everywhere Mission Conference we attended in June in preparation for being missionaries, we received one piece of advice over and over: be flexible, don't have many expectations, they won't be met.

This advice is well and good, but we still left for Taiwan with two secret goals: to experience an earthquake and a typhoon. This might seem strange to those of you who have been through these things before, but we're from Colorado. Nothing dramatic happens out there! Of course, we didn't want anything too scary, no lost lives or anything. Just something to shake us up.

Yesterday at 3:43pm one of our goals was fulfilled!!! About 75 miles ESE of Taipei, there was a 5.3 magnitude earthquake. According to the USGS, this magnitude of earthquake is enough to cause significant damage and really shake things up. Thank God we were pretty far away. We were on the fourth floor of the Cathedral's education building when we felt the building "rolling." It only lasted about 5 seconds, but immediately we looked at each other with amazement that we had survived our first earthquake. The map here shows the location of the earthquake. If you would like more info, or perhaps are curious about the recent earthquakes in Utah, Southern Missouri, and Colorado(!) I highly recommend this link: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter


In other news, last Sunday was the kick-off of the Teenage Fellowship (Youth Group) at the Cathedral. Elizabeth had about 37 activities planned, just in case. Somehow, out of the 37 possible activities, we ended up playing "the knot game." I guess this is part of an universal language. . .

The Teenage Fellowship promises to be a great time! There are some great kids who come, including a couple of pairs of siblings (who love each other very much), the Dean's daughter, and two piano prodigies. Amazingly, they look and act








a lot like middle school students. Elizabeth is starting into a unit on worship next week, beginning with the basics of order of service and liturgy.

Elizabeth also began working at the Good Shepherd kindergarten on Monday! In Taiwan, kindergarten means 3, 4, and 5 year olds. The 3 year olds spent the whole time crying because this is their second week away from their parents. Next week Elizabeth is going to introduce "Heads, shoulders, knees, and toes." It should be a great follow up to "Silly Willy" which introduced important concepts such as feet, hands, head, hat, gloves, and shoes. This kindergarten stuff is deep.

Finally, we had an interesting Chinese lesson this week. We are being tutored twice a week by the Dean of the cathedral who is generously offering us his time and Chinese expertise. Yesterday Seth asked about how to say Church and Episcopal Church. This is the explanation that followed:
The Chinese characters for "Episcopal Church" look like this: 教 and it is pronounced: sheng gong jiao. The best part is, the direct Mandarin to English translation is "Holy Catholic Church." The middle character also means "public" or "universal." It is seen on many signs like "public park" or "public restroom." In a series of strange events, the Roman Catholic Church in Taiwan is known as something like "Christian God Church." As told by Rev. Lin, this is because the Roman Catholics, during the early stages of missionary work in Taiwan, translated the word "God" differently than the protestant churches. Therefore, the Roman Catholic church is known by it's translation of the word "God." If you think it is weird when people separately refer to "Christians" and "Catholics" in the US, it actually makes sense here. According to Rev. Lin, the average Taiwanese person, unfamiliar with Christianity, sees that the Roman Catholics and Protestants have different words for God, meaning they must be different religions. Of course, many years have passed since the original translations, and both churches now use the same translation for God. But the Episcopal church still holds onto the title "Holy Catholic Church" because, well, "it says so in the creed." Sounds good to me.

Finally, we get to see some pretty interesting examples of culture clash. We took this picture walking by the National Opera House last week. The steps of the opera house are popular for various community groups to practice dancing, tai chi, martial arts, etc. On this particular day there was a group of older people doing tai chi (on the left) and a group of teenagers practicing a hip-hop routine (on the right). The slow and methodical movements of the tai chi group were in stark contrast to the MTV influenced hip-hop group. And as far as we could tell, they didn't seem to be bothering each other.

May God bless you richly this week.

Love,

Elizabeth and Seth