Active Attractive April

For April we've been trying to do things to be more attractive and also just to do things actively. Attractive April kind of started as a joke, but this weekend we all got new haircuts and are looking pretty good! We went to Wuhan to hang out with Peach (she just recently moved there to start a job/internship) and stock up on cheese and cream cheese. We ate Dairy Queen and hit some other Western restaurants. There's also a new Starbucks in Wuhan!!!! So basically we gorged ourselves on pizza, ice cream and coffee all weekend. (A little counterproductive to Attractive April).

For Active April we're all trying to continue to stay physically active (which helps the attractive part). And I also actively got a tattoo. :)

I'd played around with the idea a while back. I thought it would be a great conversation starter and a declaration of faith. It says "en dian" which means Grace. Recently the idea of His abundant grace has been really overwhelming and comforting to me. It's by grace we've been saved! I stole this song as a favorite from Erin:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound!
Amazing love, now flowing down
From hands and feet that were nailed to the tree
His grace flows down and covers me!
It covers me!

Did it hurt? Well, yes. But anything that lasts a lifetime is bound to hurt (my philosophical thought for the day). It certainly wasn't unbearable, and I'm glad I did it. I even drew the flower design myself. And it serves as a constant reminder that as permanent as this tattoo is, so is His amazing, abundant, overflowing grace and love. Amen!

Another goal we've found is to actively help the environment by minimizing wastefulness. For example, China is about to adopt a policy where customers have to purchase plastic bags to encourage people to bring a cloth bag or reuse old plastic bags. We also realized the other day the extreme waste that comes from disposable chopsticks. If you think of every person in China using three sets of wooden disposable chopsticks a day for a year, think of all those trees!
So we've been inspired (actually by one of Brad's students) to start carrying our own pair of chopsticks to reduce our use of disposable ones.

Beth found this from the Washington Post

"China now produces and discards more than 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year, cutting down as many as 25 million trees in the process, according to government statistics. Another 15 billion pairs are exported to Japan, South Korea and other countries. At the current rate of timber use, environmentalists warn, China will consume its remaining forests in about a decade."

Beth and I made chopstick covers to encourage our being actively domestic :). We'll keep you posted on other ways we're actively doing stuff. What can you actively do?!