Vietnam adventures

P and I are flying home today from Vietnam. We were on vacation here for the last 10 days and it has been wonderful, not just for the luxe hotels, delicious food, beautiful scenery, friendly people and enriching cultural experiences which is what most people normally expect from time abroad, but we have been graced by God’s multiple blessings day to day and this has magnified our travel experience, making it a time of great spiritual joy and growth. 

Before I came, my prayer was that we would bless the people here as well as be blessed by all we meet and God has honoured my prayer through and through. The day we arrived in Saigon, we managed to attend a confirmation mass of 12 young adults presided by the Archbishop of the Mekong Delta and four other priests. We could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit and the mass was like a promise that He would journey with us as we travelled through Vietnam. 

P was bugged by a nose infection and he sprained his knee when we were in Dalat, so instead of hiking, we ended up visiting more Catholic churches, travelling to the areas where various ethnic tribes lived. When we visited Domaine de Marie which is a convent of the Daughters of Charity, sweet, friendly Soeur Pierre Ky invited us to visit the inner courtyard of the convent grounds. It was a rare privilege we both enjoyed and I got to practice my very rudimentary French. We also got to eat crickets and silkworms (P balked at that one) besides the pancakes and strawberries Dalat is known for. I love trying new food so I was in heaven and I am very inspired to try cooking some of what I have tasted on this trip. 

We then flew to Danang and travelled to Hue as our base to visit Lavang. Using A’s rain prayer we managed to tour the grounds of Our Lady of Lavang Shrine with minimal weather disruption. Even our guide was surprised for it was raining heavily on the way there. The moment we arrived at the shrine, there was only a fine drizzle. When we sat and prayed, the rain became heavier, but the moment we finished and wanted to walk around, the drizzle became fine again. 

As our guide’s brother was a priest, we managed to go inside the Benedictine monastery of Thien An this time around for his brother’s fellow seminarian, a monk, kindly took us on a tour of their 18-hectare grounds. We heard them chanting in prayer before we visited the old church built underground and we walked through their orchards of longans, oranges, pomelos, bananas, dragon fruit and tea tree bushes. We visited their farm area where they reared fish, chickens and cattle and we also saw the huge vats they used to produce the tea tree oil that they sold. It was a lovely, leisurely afternoon where we sat in the old chapel grounds and ate their oranges. We were recounted with tales of how the monastery was protected miraculously despite efforts to try and regain their land for development.

One evening during dinner, P discovered he had lost his wallet. We knew it was unlikely it was stolen so we prayed for its recovery. Thanks to the intercession of Saint Anthony and Our Mother, we quickly found it as we retraced the steps of our long walk before dinner. I somehow knew we would find it and we even knew roughly where we needed to look. This was, to us, a testament of how much the Lord loved and protected us yet again. Other instances include how the Spirit guided P to try the side door of a church in Kadon so that we could go in and pray; and also to cut short our trip by one day to avoid the imminent typhoon. Our guide told us this morning that the path of the typhoon altered overnight to favour us. We are currently sitting in the airport lounge in Danang where the weather is grey but dry outside, after leaving the rain in Hoi An this morning. 

So many blessings to write about but the one thing I feel most blessed by with this holiday is the greater realization that I have a lifelong companion who loves Jesus and Mary as much as I do and who seeks to bless others financially with a rare generosity of heart. There can be no greater blessing than to have a husband who is a man with clean hands and pure heart, a man who models himself after Jesus. For that I am most grateful. 

The business of gentle

Today is the first day in a very long week that I actually had a nice generous chunk of me time to reflect and write. Since the Feast Day of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary which fell on August 22, I felt a renewed desire to write but have had to put my intentions on the back burner for there was a need for me to put my energies into a domestic issue, thanks to COVID (no, I still haven’t gotten the coronavirus).

What really kept me sane and relatively civil was the first reading last weekend from Ecclesiasticus chapter three, verses 19-21:

My son, be gentle in carrying out your business, and you will be better loved than a lavish giver. The greater you are, the more you should behave humbly, and then you will find favour with the Lord; for great though the power of the Lord is, he accepts the homage of the humble.

Being generous, being a giver is not enough. I have to be gentle in carrying out my business, which implies humility as seen in the next sentence. This gentleness or meekness, a hallmark of our Blessed Mother, is something I have been attempting to acquire for some time now. I am never the most patient of people and my quick temper has often guided my tongue with regrettable harshness. So I have made a concerted effort to be ‘gentle’ even when I least felt like it, what with the pouring downfall in days past, both literally and figuratively. Although, I was eternally grateful for the rain for it meant one less task of having to water my plants.

I can only attribute all my triumphs to the Holy Spirit for this business of being gentle was my desire through this week. I have had the insight to know when to keep silent and what to proffer with humility in the different circumstances that have presented themselves and not go with my knee-jerk, bull-in-the-china-shop inclinations. I have been able to find joy in everything that I do and not find any task too onerous. Despite my physical aches and pains, my inability to sleep well, and my soaring kan cheong blood pressure, I have been able to keep my cool most of the time. Most of all, I have been able to recognize all the graces I have received in this last week of great challenges and be grateful.   

Truly I thank God for His mercies big and small. I have kept praying throughout, I have even asked for others to intercede for me, and I feel blessed that I have been able to use my gifts and talents in ways that have made a difference to others. May I continue to find favour with the Lord.