Last Nights Dream and Funny Joke From this Sunday's Sermon

Just wanted to share a few thoughts unrelated to anything we talked about your night time and your morning time.    I guess I didn't get to share these thoughts because they were kind of random and had no reason to come up.  Last night, or probably to be more accurate this morning, I had a rather vivid dream.  I remember parts of the plot and parts of the locations, but not the people.  I think the cast of my dream was an ensemble of unsuspecting classmates from high school.  It was dark for the most part, I don't think we saw any daylight.  The locales seemed like the countryside of Hong Kong.  For most of the time I was preparing for this huge diving expedition.  I don't think I've told you but when I was younger I thought that the deep sea would be scary.  This might have been because of one of the adventure series of books that I liked to read, or the scary creatures that lived in the dark, or the immense pressure that was in the deep sea.  It was strange that I would dream about deep sea diving since this would be one of my biggest fears, instead I treated the trip as a fun and liberating one. For some reason the deep sea was bright and clear and I could sea everything.  I could breathe without a water supply, and so could my two companions.  We dived near Hong Kong I guess, although we did take a boat ride that took us further off the shores.  We were on some kind of mission, although from this point on it is a little hazy.  By the time I woke up it was 11.  I think I found it especially hard to wake up since the dream seemed so real so I slept in till 12.  I think that was easily one of the strangest, most enjoyable and most vivid dreams I've had in a long time.

At church the pastor was commenting on how words are often complicated and easy to misunderstand, and how that affected the word 'deliverance' in Philippians 1:19, since the translation from Greek could be better interpreted as 'salvation' (can discuss more later if you want :)   ).  So he made a joke about how it is often easy to be misunderstood when speaking other languages and he made an anecdote about two separate events of miscommunication when he was a missionary in China.  One time he was on a tour at the forbidden city and the tour guide made a mistake by describing a location where the emperor liked to come with cucumbers, she meant to say concubines.  On another occasion he introduced his wife as his 茄子 instead of his 妻子.  I think it's funny because I heard someone comment that pastors are often afraid that people will remember their jokes during their sermons, but not the message.  I'm thankful that I remember some of his message too!  I've been thinking about setting up a system where I write my notes on the service bulletin and then coming home to transcribe it onto a master set of notes on my computer...

To round off my thoughts I'd like to share that my butt muscle aches from squash.  Why, why do I always forget the butt muscle?  Next time I'll need to remind myself to stretch it well first.  Actually, a lot of my other muscles are aching, but not as badly because I stretched them.