Redwall in the Rain

Julia’s Bday was a Redwall Abby feast, based on a serises of books our kids love by Brian Jaques.  Our game team members willingly entering into the imaginary world of the medieval abbey populated by animals, entertained by riddles, quests, poetry and most importantly the FEAST.  Scott and Pat made large Bundibugyo batches of “spicy hot root soup” (a specialty of the otters, I’m told) to go with Scotticus’ scones, and Wendy even went on line to find a recipe for “pasties”.  Sweet meadow cream was provided by our cow in the form of two large batches of ice cream.  Joe and Ivan even wrote special original poems, and Jack spent hours drawing about 20 pictures of various Redwall characters for putting on people’s backs so they could guess who they were.  Ashley spent most of the day helping with the kids.  In short it was a whole-team effort to celebrate with Julia.  And I needed it, because when the spectacular sun dimmed and then an ominous storm blew in, swirling shades of gray clouds and driving rain which persisted in a depressing drizzle, it was pretty chaotic.  We had 37 people hanging out, which is really only possible in our life if the party is mainly outdoors.  It was probably a pretty unusual 11 year old  birthday mix of adults and kids from 7 countries . . . It happened to be the day that a plane of visitors came from MAF to tour our mission and spend the night, and we’ve recently had a young German international exchange student joining us for some team events (he was assigned to a local family, which has been challenging for him to say the least), plus a half dozen or so Bundibugyo friends Julia wanted to invite.  Julia enjoyed herself and sensed our love, which I can now put into perspective were the essential elements of the evening, in spite of my discouragement over the rain.  I suppose it rained on festivals in medieval times too, and they probably had a much less entitled and demanding expectation of God’s favors than I do.