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While Fran is in the other room striving away at preparing her lecture for the Ladies’ Day BSF class, I am recuperating from my presentation last night. I delivered my first ever lecture for the Evening Mens’ BSF class. Our teaching leader suddenly needed to visit his elderly father who had suffered a nasty fall. So . . . as the Substitute Teaching Leader, I was pressed into service.
I have taught a fair number of times but I can’t remember ever giving a 40 minute nonstop talk. I can’t believe how much time it took me to prepare a coherent talk over John 6:22 – 40. I have a whole new respect for those men and women who prepare and deliver lectures/sermons week after week. Now I’m sure it gets a little easier, but WOW it really took it out of me.
Now I start the cycle all over again so that I can cover for him one more week. Read John 6:41-71 & then pray for me as I prepare another lecture for next Monday night!
Later! – Jackie

You’ll never guess what I [Fran] did today.
“Bootscoot?” Nope.
“Ice Skate?” Nope again.
“Sing from the Alps?”. No. I told you, you’d never guess!
I’m so confused! I attended the French opera “La Traviata”, sung in Italian, translated in Chinese! I’m thankful for Shirley, who did her best to translate the Chinese into English for me. Visit the web listed here – for a brief summation of the plot.

http://opera.stanford.edu/Verdi/Traviata/main.html

Now this Texas country bumpkin has never watched an opera – this is funny, that I had to travel to the other side of the world to get such varible cultural exposure. My first thoughts about the presentation was “over-exagerated emotional expression in song”. But as I listened, and Shirley translated, it was quite interesting and entertaining. I won’t make a daily habbit of it, I’m sure. Shirley treated me to this event. We left leaders meeting today and she drove us over to a fairly nice hotel. We dined on a western/asian buffet for about an hour among 50-60 others who reserved to participate. Then a Prof. from one of the universities introduced the Plot (in Chinese of course), and then we watched the opera on a large screen – DVD. Yea, I had you going, that you thought this was a live performance. The speaker system was good, and the setting was quite comfortable. During an intermission, the Prof. came over and talked with me in English for a few minutes, then when it was over he presented me with a poster.
This is my first time to not spend Tues afternoon & night prepareing the lecture. I prepared about 2/3 of the lecture in advance – so hopefully tonight will not be an all nighter for tomorrow’s lecture prep. Ta Ta.