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.
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