Autumn @ 19-1-601

Here is a photo taken from the kitchen window of our apartment @ 府苑新村19-1-601. This is where we live.

I didn't expect to see anything like Autumn here, so these few colorful trees are a nice surprise.

I've shown you the view from our place once or twice before - the fireworks most recently, and a view of the mountains a while back.

Turns out, though, that the time of our views from 19-1-601 is limited. Wei and Zhou have sold the apartment. We will be moving out in January.

She is helping us to arrange a new place, still here within the FYXC apartment complex. It will probably be near the back, or western, side of the grounds - farther from the street, the bus stops, the shops, the restaurant, the canal. Probably on the second floor - which has the plus of not being the sixth floor, but probably means we won't have our same mountain view. In fact, it certainly will not be our same view. It will be different.

Even if we can still see the mountains, even if we can still see the changing leaves - well, the trees will be barren in January, I suppose - still, the location will have changed, the perspective will have shifted, that "certain slant of light" the poet speaks of will be coming in through another window.

Our life will change, will shift - how, we know not - as it always does, for each of us. We will have new blessings - it is reported that this place has newer furnishings and an extra bedroom. We will have new frustrations, new inconveniences - longer walks to and from the bus, carrying our groceries in the then-freezing temperatures, perhaps clumsily balancing an umbrella in one hand, fumbling for the keys with the other, wind-whipped snow or drizzle or worse threatening at every moment to colapse the whole teetering performance.

Or...

I was just reading something last night: G.K. Chesterson, as quoted in Richard Foster's Spiritual Classics, says, "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered." For example, he says, consider the way we might react to a jammed kitchen drawer: Most of us have somehow come to expect that drawers should and must always open smoothly the first time; but, come to think of it, why should we expect this? And certainly, why should we huff and puff and curse and spit when - not surprisingly, after all - we find that, in this fallen world (in this physical world, fallen or not, I would suppose), the drawer happens, this time, to be jammed? Why not rather think of this as an invitation to adventure?

Imagine yourself a surgeon, he would suggest, performing a complex operation in hopes of removing - in your case, a dish towel, let's say - from the patient's abdomen. If you were in the operating room and met such a difficulty, how would you react? Surely it does no good to curse the towel, nor the abdomen, not the man lying on your table (whose fault it presumably is for swallowing the rag in the first place). Instead, we need to "make the most of every opportunity" - concentrate, remain calm, take it a step at a time - and after it is all over, maybe even remember to thank the One who gifted us with this (albeit unexpected) chance to exercise our unique skills.

And the same goes for moving: I am, after all, "just a pilgrim here below," so I should by no means find it strange that I am asked to move from time to time. I need not worry at the inconvenience of it all. Rather, I should view this as a sort of small adventure. A new home, a new view; a new perspective, a new outlook.

And I shall bless the Maker of it all.