First, I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to visit my mom in Indonesia.  Thanks to your prayers, she is now making good progress.  While there, I flew to Malang and spent a day to visit with friends in the seminary who are ill.  By the grace of God, they are weathering the storms of life; they live one day at a time and do their best to remain active while they can.  It was both joyful and painful to see them.  I pray that I will be able to see them again.

While in Malang, I also got together with some old minister-friends.  Because our children are about the same ages, we used to go out to Batu and Tretes together in the early days of our stay in Malang. But now they are retired, so the topics of our conversation are different.  Now they asked among themselves questions like, “Hey, are you still able to put on your pants standing up?”  One answered, “I have to sit” while another answered, “I must lean my back against the wall.”

Hearing that I chuckled, not because I can still put on my pants with my two feet on the ground, but also because I remembered hearing the same conversation between Oom Tek Bien and the rest of the gang that used to sit at that corner in our dining hall, which they nostalgically called, Warung Pojok.  Never did I imagine that I would be engaged in the same conversation fifteen years later!  Time flies and I am catching up.  We may have come from all over, but we are headed in the same direction and traveling on the same road.

Psalm 71:20 gives this assurance to us who are already on that road, “Though You have made me see troubles, many and bitter, You will restore my life again; from the depths of the earth You will again bring me up.”  What lies behind this earthly destination—the depths of the earth—is this new life in heavens.  God will bring us up; He’ll restore our lives again; and He’ll make us see bliss, many and sweet.

Pastor Paul