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| Only existing photo due to camera restrictions. But it's a winner! |
We're planning our day trip to Chiang Mai Zoo. Yupa tells me me that not too long ago, they opened a Snow Dome. For an additional fee, "We can play in the snow," she says. I vow to make sure it will happen, not knowing how much the extra fee will be but not caring one bit. Give these kids a taste of winter? You bet!
Zoo Day is hot. We stop for water and frozen treats half way into the hour long drive there. We arrive slightly wilted, but still very excited. There's lots to see along the shaded pathways. First we visit the giraffes.
It's the closest I've ever been to one, actually. They're very interactive since there's leafy food you can buy to actually feed them by hand. Such beautiful eyes on these creatures.
We won't get so up close and personal with the lions or rhino, but we will be entertained by a white-cheeked gibbon who has become an expert at catching morsels tossed to him. Hilarious! He should be signed up for some baseball team, he's
that good.
Later I will remember all of this with fondness, mostly because of the way the children are impressed with the animals, reading the information plaques, holding hands with one another, and always some little hand slipping into mine, as we
sweat make our way from one exhibit to another.
But it will be the Snow Dome where I hear Him say it.
The signs warn us that, inside, it's -7C. Standing in the
hot long line up, this sounds wonderful to me. We are given red jackets, and I consider refusing mine, but not wanting to push it, I settle for putting it on but not doing it up. Even stepping into the first room, an ante-chamber of preparation to reduce the shock, there is life and vigor pouring out from behind the larger refrigerator-type door. My inner Canadian is clamoring to get in there! But first we listen to the rules, and the warnings about how cold it will be.
And then.
We tumble into a room full of packed down snow with blocks of ice and benches and rubber tubes for the 'sly-DER' aka a short but satisfyingly spinny toboggan hill. Suddenly the flip flops are ridiculous, but nobody cares. Just stepping into the cold air brings laughing and squealing and exclamations of wonder and surprise. It's so cold! Yes it is!!!! Welcome to Canada, I say.
Two by two we climb carefully up a set of stairs where an attendant (read, brave Thai person for working in -7 C all day) helps position us on the tube and pushes us off. Commence the screaming. Yes, even the big boys. Yupa insists I sit at the 'front', which, poor thing, is sort of on top of her, but she's afraid and wants me, the experienced winter sports person, to sort of steer the thing, or manage the thing. But there is no steering or managing to be done. We are hurled off without much warning, to whisk up and sideways against an icy snow bank, and thrown, screaming, down and around to where we come to an abrupt stop, aided by yet another brave Thai attendant.
Yupa wants to do it again!!!!!! And so it goes with all of them. Their first ever toboggan ride, something they will always remember, because they
can, because they weren't months old when it happened for them, like it was for me.
And their finger tips are tingling and their noses red and they can't stop smiling, it's
that cold. They don't mind it at all. They are loving every single moment. And it is joy in its purest form.
And that's when He says it to me.
I'm not sure if it happens this way for others, but for me, there are moments, like this one right here and now, when it's as if everything goes into a freeze (pun intended here) and time stands still. And I have the chance just to look around at the faces and the joy, and I feel it in such an overwhelming sort of way that it's as if the voice of God is speaking.
"See this, Ruth Anne? See this purity of joy? Doesn't this, this moment of shalom, shalom (everything as I mean it to be) override all those sad things?"
Pause the pause for a bit of back story. I think it's because I was eleven years old when, having a missionary speaker come to our church, I first entertained an idea of coming to southeast Asia. I was just a child. And I think it's also because because now this is all about the children, I think that's why I make so much connection, so often when I'm here, to my own childhood.
A lot of sad things happened for me in my childhood, at least that's how I remember them. And a lot of sad things have happened for these children before coming to live with us.
But today, in this joy-packed moment of cold amazement, it's as if all those sad things don't matter any more. It's not like they never happened. They did, and they are part of our stories, becoming, under God's good grace, part of who we are in strength and compassion and capacity. But the stink has gone out of them, the sting, the wounding. There is such healing for me in this frozen moment.
When I was eleven, experiencing the sadness, the weirdness that I couldn't figure out then, if you had told me, don't worry, one day you'll be tobogganing with outrageously delighted children on the other side of the planet and it will all makes sense, I could never have imagined.
And that's what He gives me this day. A beyond-imagining way of healing for me.
Time's up for our Snow Dome adventure. But that's probably okay because some of them are actually shivering by now. We all reach down and touch the snow once more in fond reverence, and move back as a group to hand over the red jackets we certainly won't need outside.
The fun isn't over, and I will hear echoes of His voice at the Splash pad and also on the ride home when all the fun has napped us all out, and sweaty sleepy littles are told that we're home.
The whole of it, the admission to the Zoo, and the Aquarium, and the Snow Dome and the Splash Pad, and the frozen treats and lunch and supper, all of it, will only have cost $15 per kid. Didn't have to worry about the budget one bit.
