My mom brought lovely cooler weather and some rain with her. But now that she's gone, the heat and sunshine has returned. Great laundry weather! We attended the 6:00 a.m. service at church this morning, partially to escape the heat. When we went to the wharf around 8:00 to deliver a box to the Kosco, the sun was already beating down and heating the morning air. This afternoon, Honiara's power went off. And SITAG's generator wouldn't start. I had forgotten how spoiled rotten we are in town to our ceiling fans. As we sweated, I was reminded of a passage I recently read in "Sometimes I Prefer to Fuss" by Verda Peet:
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Once, wondering if people who say they feel the heat just make more fuss about it than others who complain less and get on with the job, I consulted one of our mission doctors. She gave me a long and impressive list of things that can happen to you in the heat; circulatory instability, heat edema and salt depletion, ending with chronic tropical fatigue. Then she spoiled it by adding "Heat reduces the willingness to work rather than the capacity for work." This confirmed my suspicion that intolerance of heat is related to love of comfort. The more I want to be at ease the harder I find it to live in the tropics. It is extremely easy to be lazy and cantankerous in the heat, and it is a rare missionary who stays completely sanctified while the thermometer lingers in the 90's. How much we need what Evelyn Underhill calls "an established temperature of God-given peace and joy, a climate of eternity at our center."...When I fussed about the rain or wished it were cooler I would quote to myself Amy Carmichael's poem, which is really about something more important than weather:
"We do not ask to choose our garden's weather,
Too ignorant are we.
Only that we, Thy gardeners together,
May pleasure Thee."
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