Monday Motivator

Can you believe the first quarter of 2008 has slipped away? Well, believe it! How are you doing with the resolutions you set back in January? I am following through and staying the course, slip-ups and all.

I finally feel like I am home and things are back to normal. Vietnam was a wonderful experience. It amazes me how no matter how different we all may be in ethnicity and culture; we are all so much the same in heart and emotion. People are people. Our first stop in Saigon was “in your face” fast, congested, millions of honking motorbikes (mopeds and small motorcycles) mixing with bicycles and a few cars. Our tour bus was like a grand God that moved slowly but without hesitation through all this energy in motion. There are 3 people on the motorbike in this picture.

The one thing I never did get used to seeing was infants and toddlers riding in their moms arms on these motorbikes. The whole family (yes, 5 people) ride on one motorbike! As a matter of fact, they move everything with their motorbikes; boxes, fine china dishes (not wrapped and packed), furniture, refrigerators, full panes of glass, 1-5 full grown pigs, baskets of chickens, and even a 1500 lb water buffalo! They get the animals drunk with homemade rice wine and tie them on the back of their motorbikes. It’s really a bad thing when the animal wakes up before the trip is over. The farmer has to make sure to have more rice wine with him to settle the animal back down to sleep for the rest of the trip.

Saigon was also where there was a concentration of war propaganda. Once we headed north, we heard less about the history of the country as it pertained to the Vietnam War. This aspect was good for me, in that I was just born when that conflict was going on. I really knew very little about any of it. I am very aware however, that learning from the Vietnamese presents a slant that my fellow Americans would be fast to question. In any case, it gave me a good foundation to ask Ken questions and have a better understanding of his answers. We crawled through the tunnels, visited pagodas, talked with many of the local people, and played with many children. We were ready to leave the city and head north to Hoi An and Da Nung. I’ll tell you about that next week. Scroll down to see more pictures from Saigon.

Have a wonderful week and take a good look around you, right now, and acknowledge how much you have. It is unbelievable how abundant our lives are. You don’t have to go to a third world country to see how much you have, you know where I’m going with this. Be sure to make time to say “thank you.” Say it now, say it in an hour, and then say it again after that.

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice.-- Meister Eckhart