Eric's Beijing Diary

I'm sitting here in my hotel room in Langfang. I've just been listening to an mp3 file I downloaded from Sermonaudio.com. It's the end of a two part series by Leonard Ravenhill on John the Baptist. He said the altar is only there for one reason, and that is sacrifice. It is a place of death, and if you are not prepared to die, then don't go there. Watchman Nee used to say that nothing we have is of any use to God until it has been to the cross. The divine principle of life out of death is perhaps one the the hardest for us to grasp, not because it is so complicated, but because when it comes right down to it, we don't want to die.

Breakfast this morning was buffet style. No raw eggs. The Brit from Lanzhou, whom I met here a few weeks ago, mentioned something that went by me at the time, but which I now think may have some merit. He said that the breakfast I am getting in Langfang may be their idea of what a Western breakfast is supposed to look like: an open-faced egg on a plate, some bread, a jar of jam... But in America, the open-faced egg is fried, not raw. Nothing against raw eggs, you understand. I remember when I was a kid in the mountains of central Japan, eating something we called "natsusoba," which involved dipping noodles in a mixture of raw eggs and soy sauce. I think it was a regional specialty or something, because I have Japanese friends who have no idea what I am talking about when I tell them about it. But it was the going thing in Kashiwabara. Anyway, as I said, I have nothing against raw eggs. But eating a raw egg all by itself seems so meaningless. I remember years ago, in my younger days, when Jeanne paid me twenty-five cents apiece to eat four of them. My price has gone up.