A Bowl Full Of Blessings

I know I haven't painted my own life's picture. God has handed me the brush, but he has really painted my life's portrait filled with colorful people, colorful experiences, and colorful opportunities. I am so blessed in fact, because my life is like a bowl full of blessings, crafted by the potter's hand.

The opportunities and the stories included here are like a bowl full of blessing piled high through months of meeting faculty, leaders and students, reading, reflecting, researching, and teaching at Huaihua University. The deep relationships have become the golden threads woven into the tapestry of this effort to construct a proverbial wind and rain bridge building friendships and community critical to teaching, research, learning and exchange. Most of all, we have created something called people to people diplomacy or citizen to citizen exchange which complements traditional diplomacy helping colleagues, both in China and America, to become acquainted.

Providing a look into a semester of experiences in a world much different than my own is the focus of this sabbatical memoir. As I share the stories and situations I experienced in the spicy southern part China, I hope to create for you a greater understanding of both the sunny and foggy atmosphere which is ameliorated by the clean air truck shooting steam into the air while playing the tune of Disney's "It's small world, after all." It's a world of laughter, a world of tears. It's a world of hopes, and a world of fears. There's so much that we share, that it's time we're aware. It's a small world after all.

The described opportunities came from taking a semester sabbatical to help build a relationship between the university where I teach and direct programs and a university some 6000+ miles away in the Hunan Province of China. I was invited by the Vice President of Huihua (Why-wha) University and my Vice President of Concordia University, St. Paul, to help build a cooperative relationship between the two universities to create an exchange program between faculty in the Art and Design School/department and for students studying in the universities