Heidi and I are the happy and thankful parents of a beautiful little baby!

It used to be that when I heard of a little baby being born, I would very much be excited to ask what the gender, name, and weight of the little one was because I love little babies. I would always follow this up with a question on how the Mom was doing because that was the “proper” question to be asked. Of course, the answer to the latter was always that she was doing “fine”, as was the little child.

Saturday changed all that. I have been in many difficult and challenging situations over the course of the past 28 years. For those who know me well, they would tell you that the more challenging the situation, the more I thrived. If that happened to be diving to the maximum recreational depths, snowboarding down the hardest cliffs and mountains, climbing up the most challenging rock faces, whatever. Given all these times, there is no question in my mind that the most difficult time in my life was on Saturday … and I wasn’t even the one delivering the baby.

There is no question that beautiful little babies are wonderful, precious and the gifts of God from the hand of a loving Creator. I do not want to take away from that. His purposes are loving and eternal and He “lends” us these ones to bring up for Him – as Hannah did Samual. I’ve thought about that over and over in the past nine months. But it is also true that there are millions of untold stories of difficulty and courage that lie behind those same little babies – including you. There were times in that room on Saturday with Heidi that I was praying more hard than I think I’ve ever prayed for my wonderful and special wife, Heidi. I know that I will never forget the miracle and answer to prayer as long as I live. Heidi. I’m not going to give you the story (as it is not mine to tell), but those of you who have had children or gone through the birth of a little child, whether it took 3 hours, 12 hours or more than 24 hours will know a little bit of what I mean.

It was a perfect and wonderful little baby boy. Jake Bertram. He weighs in at 8 lb even and was about 22″ long. He had a little bit of stress during delivery, but is doing very well. I’m going to put some pictures up (although I don’t have a lot yet), and you can decide who he looks like.

And yes, Heidi and Jake are not just doing “fine”, but are doing well. The Lord has truly given us cause to smile.

I really did mean to send an update while I was in Japan. However, I guess I never did get around to writing this up and now I’m back in Boston. Better late than never.

If you have the opportunity to visit either China or Japan, I would definitely put my recommendation on the former. While Tokyo was interesting and fun (I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much raw fish in my life), it didn’t have the same cultural feeling as Shanghai, China. There were two chief differences in my mind: the first was the sound and the second was the architecture.

Japan was just so quiet compared to China. Every time you went out in China, you took your life in your hands and the noise level was incredible. Horns, horns and more horns. There was no such thing as lanes and turns, it was a fight with noise and size to make it anywhere. The first thing that hit me about Japan was that there were no car horns at all. (They also drive on the left, as in England and Australia.) It just seemed that the traffic flow was so quiet. It carried over into conversation as well. People spoke in low, muted tones and were very withdrawn and hushed.

The seond chief difference was the architecture. China had huge towering new architecture everywhere you looked of all shapes and sizes . To contrast this, Japan seemed to have been built in the 1960’s with little new development since then. It was just another Western style city with square block buildings. Outside of the Emporer’s palace and park, the city reminded me of any other in North America. Perhaps it was just the zip and zest that seemed to be missing.

There were many other differences as well. English seems to be spoken much better in China than in Japan where I needed an interpreter for several of my meetings. The food also seems to be more singular around sushi, tempura and raw fish (all very good). There were many more McDonald’s and Starbucks in Tokyo, but that could simply be because of the capitalist government. Another very fascinating aspect of Japanese culture was that no one shakes hands. Everyone bows to each other several times. From a sanitary perspective, I would say that this is generally a good thing.

Anyway, back to work today and catching up on a million things from last week. I forgot to take my camera with me, but I will certainly be uploading some pictures tonight or tomorrow. Smile all.

New York city, where I have worked on almost a weekly basis over the last year, can be called nothing but small. After staying in a hotel like the one in Shanghai, surrounded on all sides by 50 story buildings as far as the eye could see, there is nothing to be said except that New York is small by comparison. I’ve also come to the conclusion that service is a lost commodity in North America. In business settings, we give such lip service to service being the driving force behind Western “success”, but I have to say that both service and growth pale in comparison to what I observed in Shanghai.

Why is this? If nothing else, it raises some interesting questions about western culture. On both the way over here and several times in Shanghai, I’ve had very interesting discussions with people regarding the recent elections and the morality (if I may call it that) of America. It raises some interesting thought lines. I believe that to a large degree, we have purposely discarded the Christian foundation on which both Canada and the United States were founded. We are on the path to becoming more and more like the European union, which purposely excluded all reference to God or Christianity in its constitution only a few weeks ago. The loss of this foundation, leads to a secularism exclusive of any Christian principles. It means that people do not want to see a Christian in the Whitehouse, nor do they want morals guiding the country. Individuals fight for their rights. They do not wish to be submissive to anyone, and certainly not one who is openly a God-fearing man.

What a contrast here in China! We tend to think of Tiananman Square only 15 short years ago, and maybe it isn’t all that far back. While here, we spent considerable time with our very genial and friendly hosts. They were more than a little hospitable with their description of local customs, sights and culture. However, when a single question about politics came up, they immediately averted their eyes and said quietly that they could not talk about that. There was no question in their mind that they were to be submissive to the government and not question its ultimate authority. But is this worse than our “progressive” society? We assume that certain “rights” belong to us and we can question any and all authority. It means that small things like service simply disappear. Why should we be subservient to someone else? It is little wonder to me that the mountain will be cast into the sea?

I had a very interesting discussion with two colleagues today about how the Lord must look down from heaven and be so grieved with how much we have “progressed”. We fight against terrorism around the world, while we fight for the “right” to kill 4000 unborn children each day in America. While our conversation was more on the lines of churches and division, the differences in culture just seemed to be accentuated in my mind. Service in business and family seem more of a reality in Chinese culture than in America.

Anyway, I know that to lapse into political commentary is not a profitable exercise. The Bible shows that things will only get worse. It just seemed striking to me that a communist culture could teach us so much.

To catch up a little on last night, I went to a restaurant which is considered to be “the” restaurant in Shanghai. It’s called the M on the Bund and was written up in the New York Times just a few weeks ago. I was disappointed in that the food was Western in taste, but the rhubarb crumble was more than worth coming back for. Actually … forget the food. The view from the restaurant was as spectacular as anything I have ever seen within a city. The restaurant was directly on the Bund with a rooftop patio that looked directly across at the Pearl Tower and the Jinmai building. It was SPECTACULAR. There was no other words to describe it.

One of the more interesting things of note were the hundreds to thousands of barges, freightors, and local Chinese boats that somehow managed to keep from ramming each other as a traffic jam of water traffic flowed both ways through the canal. They ranged from being lit up like a Christmas tree, to no lights at all. It was truly a mix of old and new.

Speaking with locals, they said that Shanghai was changing so rapidly that it seemed completely different from month to month. They showed me a building which was designated as the highest building in the city only 16 years ago. By comparison to the hundreds (and I don’t use that word lightly) of buildings / skyscrapers that I could see all over the place, it was tiny. The growth is exponential. In fact, it has been so explosive, that the Chinese government is restricting incoming investment dollars to slow the economy. While it may profit some, I read in the newspaper that the average salary of a Shanghainese person was $USD 2500. The funny thing is that the pace of life seemed slower and general happiness higher than America. All very interesting to observe. Smile!