PNG End of Year Celebration- Day 4: "Stories!"

While I was waiting with a bunch of Student Life girls for Lillian’s evangelistic talk to begin, Andrea asked if I had any stories for them.

I was racking my brain thinking of a quick story to tell, and I thought of 1 ½ -year-old Isla.  So I told how she loved her children’s book about the Lost Sheep parable.  I told them that when her mom got to the middle of the book, just before the page with the scary bear, Isla held up her finger and said, “Wait!” (just like her mom does to her sometimes), and when the page was turned she started crying because the bear was scary.  Yet in spite of all that, she took the book to bed with her and held it while she took her nap.

In trying to make conversation with the people here at the guest house last night at dinner, it was a little hard to get talk flowing until we started telling stories about culture.  We told reverse culture change for our children when Nathan and Julie were 4 and 2 years old:  After moving to Guam (which is fairly “American” compared to Palau where we had been living) we went to open a bank account.  We looked around for our kids at one point and found them rolling around on the ground.  (They had never seen wall-to-wall carpeting before.)  Water fountains, they called “waterfalls,” the escalator was thrilling, the bathtub (they had only experienced showers) they insisted be filled with cold water (like a swimming pool.)

We also talked about taking islanders to a sheep farm in New Zealand.  (We thought since the Bible has a lot of sheep stories and there are

At this point, the farmer glanced over and looked a little ashen-faced.  The Tongan also looked a little pale because he thought he’d killed the sheep because the sheep just hung still and limp, while the pigs he usually picked up would wriggle.  (The sheep probably would have looked a little scared as well if we could have seen under all that wool.)  Everything turned out happily ever after, however...but I bet that sheep farmer never asks a Tongan on stage again.

Conclusion: It’s always good to have a story in your back pocket.  (And it’s also good that your kids are not always around to be embarrassed by the same old stories time and again!)


no sheep in the islands, that this would be a good idea.)  The sheep farmer had a platform on which he was about to demonstrate shearing a sheep.  He asked for a volunteer from the audience and picked our Tongan friend.  He asked our friend to bring him a sheep from the pen on the stage, then turned to the audience and continued to talk (thinking all the while that our friend would have trouble with this task.)  What the farmer might not have been aware of is that Tongans roast whole pigs every Sunday.  Our friend approached to sheep as he would a pig.  He simply reached in, grabbed the sheep by the hind legs and held him up.