weekends & sabbaths.

Friday: I was up at 5am, meeting one of the bread ladies at the door at 5:30. We had our first loaves rising in the oven by 5:45am and our first pans of cinnamon rolls being rolled out by 7:15am.

While baking, we served oranges, soy milk, & vitamins to about forty kids.

One of the batches went funny, and the neighbors absolutely refuse to throw out a mistake. I absolutely refuse to sell one 🙂 So we bake it for the neighborhood, who will generally eat anything. And they did.

But it means that, in total, we kneaded sixteen bowls of dough. We baked 24 loaves of bread & rolled out 174 tortillas. And made 192 cinnamon rolls.

At various points through the morning, I also made twelve flower bouquets. Daw Ma Oo is still away for her chemotherapy & radiation treatment, but the family still needs the money from flower sales. Her sons have been helping to keep the business going, but sometimes ask for help with the bouquet-making.

We baked until 2:30pm, when Pyo Pyo & I climbed in the car for deliveries. There was a break for lunch–about fifteen minutes because Burmese folks eat fast!–and I took a shower while they packaged up the products.

We delivered until 6:30pm, when I joked with Pyo Pyo that we started before sunrise and finished after it. We counted up finances and I skidded off to dinner with friends, followed by two more deliveries. The last deliveries were made at 9:30pm that evening, for a total of thirty-three houses around Mae Sot.

I have absolutely no photos of the entire day, but I survived it, which counts for something! And it was our most profitable Friday yet 🙂

Saturday was relatively uneventful, with only a trip to the bus station at 5:30am with a friend; only one trip to the clinic; only one English class at church; a worship practice that was less than two hours; previous-days-failed-bread served to hungry kids; and two hours of play with only one broken computer.

Yaminoo beat us all six times in a row at Sorry!  And the sunset was gorgeous above a host of kids playing and giggling in the street.

It was a beautiful day in our little neighborhood, for sure.

Sunday saw us to church with a whole lot of excited kids. They were lectured in the car about sitting down, and how they must listen or they will go home. They were told to behave at church or they wouldn’t be returning.

This lecture went unheard.

Within minutes of opening up the back of our car, a kid jumped out into a large, slippery mud puddle, spraying me with water and mud and who-knows-whatelse past my knees, then sliding on his butt through it all. Right outside the front doors of the church.

As I tried to help him up, another 3-year-old was shoved out of the back by the remaining twelve or so kids–who knew our little crew of church-going neighbor kids can create a mob in a second?–and ended up face planting on the concrete from a few feet up.

Fast foward a few minutes, when I’m very muddy and now very wet, holding a naked, bleeding, crying three-year-old as we bandage up his face. Stephen walks out after worship practice to ask, “What happened?!”

Turns out he had also dumped his entire “non-spillable” mug on the church floor when he arrived earlier, so #winning. So thankful our church still loves us, even when we show up with a host of bleeding, muddy, misbehaving kids and make a scene.

I then sat through church soaking wet with said three-year-old on my lap, sleeping from exhaustion while the lump on his forehead and lip grew exponentially. Thankfully, my anger in the car and the blood and mess helped the kids to shape up a bit, so they were extremely well-behaved through church and Sunday school, so…#youwinsomeyoulosesome.

Today, one of our best little friends, Aung Aung Ley, made his way to Bangkok to live with different family members. It’s hard to say if it will be better or not, but either way, he’ll be missed most certainly. Either way, he’s a big part of our lives, has brought many tears and smiles our way. I might even miss him asking every single day if we’ll be playing at 4pm.

And I sit here over a cup of coffee and thank the Lord for weekly Sabbaths, because that weekend alone nearly took me!