The Story

This has been an interesting week, full of lessons, mistakes and thankfully God’s grace. The most significant of the things I want to share happened on Wednesday evening after dinner. I was sitting at the kitchen table helping Cosette with a school project; John was using my work laptop researching how to repair our home computer, which is a story in it’s self, but I’ll refrain. Daniel was playing with his cars on the kitchen floor. Daniel walked up to me and started talking to me (in Mandarin) about something. But this time, he was very intent that I understood. As usual, he used a mixture of Mandarin, charades and a tiny bit of mispronounced English. He was telling me his ear hurt. He has been getting a runny nose so I assumed he might be getting an ear infection. No, he continued. He held his hands out about 18 inches apart and said Guo Heng baby, now pointing to himself. Then he said again that his ear hurt. Oh, I thought, he’s talking about his surgery when he was two. Sure enough! He continued by showing me the size of the tumor that was cut off of his ear. He used his fingers to show a cutting motion, like scissors. He took my hand and touched it to the slight indention on his cheekbone where the tumor was. Then he moved my hand to his ear. All the while rattling on in Mandarin about it all. He told me very clearly that he has one ear that is BIG, he used the English word for big, and one ear that is small, gesturing with his hands for small. He stopped the story and touched my ears; and said “mama TWO BIG ear” (in English)! Which he clearly thought was hilarious. After we all had a good laugh about mom’s big ears he went back to telling me about his own ears. He knows that he is going to have surgery to repair his ear, and it seemed he was asking when that would happen. I told him maybe next summer, using the electronic translator to be sure he understood. Always the jokester, with that silly look on his face he asked if I was going to have my ears fixed too. Silly boy!

This is very significant. The fact that he trusts us enough to share this story of when he was a baby is significant. The fact that he was able to so clearly get the whole story across to me was incredible! (I’m sure it helped that I already knew and recognized the story when he started telling it) He attempted a complete English sentence “Mama (has) two big ear” and that is amazing after only hearing English for 8 weeks. I see this moment as a breakthrough in so many ways. Thank you Father for your continued grace on this journey.