i'm enroute back to hk right now. had a good couple days chilling with my rents in bejing where they just moved to a few weeks back. my parents just moved into their new apartment, which i must say is quite nice. having only moved in a week ago, naturally we spent quite some time visiting the super walmart and carrefour to stock up their apartment. i even got to assemble a shelf for them. another role reversal moment... not that i did much to help them get settled, but going to walmart after moving into a new place is something i am fond of doing... assembling ikea-like furniture is up my alley... having my parents help me with all that is common, especially during my first few years of living independently. but now, it was me going with them to shop for them... like back to school shopping... filling up the dorm room... only they have a really sweet dorm suite.... filled up on peking duck, mcd's, burger king, noodle soup, and other stuff... yes, we love our fast food joints... especially in asia.
my mom popped me into a taxi this morning to head to the airport. i went a bit earlier in hopes of meeting my dad there. my pops had to meet someone at the airport and has a meeting there this afternoon, so i was hoping to catch him there briefly before i headed through immigration and security, but i never found him. i felt like a little kid, waiting and waiting, wandering back and forth between different coffee stands, wanting to yell for dad, hopeful and eager he'd just appear out of nowhere like in the movies, but that didn't happen. it was never a certainty it would happen but i guess i just hoped it would.... like the feeling you get when on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa. again i found myself thinking and getting annoyed about the fact that there were just so many asian faces... asian men...how am i to find my dad in the sea of these people with the same color hair and basic business attire? all throughout i got a couple of phone calls from what looked like an unfamiliar US number which i didn't pick up since i had no idea who it was... figured it's prolly not important so I didn't want to incur the charges... i gave up on finding my pops and headed onto the tram towards my gate... that same # called again.. decided to pick up and low and behold it was my dad... asking if i was ok. we didn't get to talk long so who knows what happened, but man i wished i had just picked up the phone earlier!
i can't help but wonder if God thinks the same thing back at us... as i search all over for him in the things that i'm doing, even as i call out to him in my prayers... perhaps i just need to pick up the phone and listen... i can imagine Him saying "tammy, i'm right here. you're okay. i am right here for you... why do you forget me? why do you wonder where i am?" picking up my dad's phone call incurred a financial cost - that's why i didn't pick up earlier... i mean, i also just didn't know who it was... but when we choose to pick up His phone call, sometimes that incurs a cost too... sometimes it means stopping what you're doing which from a worldly perspective is lost time and lost productivity... but if you don't pick it up, you're just going in circles or going downhill... so... pick up the phone and say hello to the one who's on the other end who is always there, always ready to embrace, if only we would let Him by taking the time to be with Him.
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