…to the ends of the Earth

Something that I have been following for a while is the “First World Pains” twitter account and I hate to admit that, usually, the posts are dead on to how the Western thought process works. I have been blessed with a lot of “stuff” (computers, instruments, books, eBooks, etc.) and sometimes I let my perspective get out of line. I’ve been worrying lately about my iPhone since I have had it for a year and a half. I have treated that thing like gold and, fortunately, it is still working. I don’t want to buy another here because you pay full price and there are no contracts or discounts, and sometimes my “home” button doesn’t respond! The greatest of tragedies!

Recently, I thoughtlessly paid the wrong price for a ticket on the Bangkok skytrain and when pushed the card into the slot I lunged at the gates because sometimes they are fast moving and you can easily get caught up in them. It is always funny to watch people when the gates surprise them, but then it happens to you and it isn’t really that funny. I paid the wrong fare and when I lunged at the gate that didn’t open I folded over and almost rolled over the gate entirely. I am sure that everyone around thought that I was just another tourist that couldn’t figure it out. Unfortunately, when the gate caught me, my Kindle was between my body and the pathway through the gates. When I was folded over the swinging arms, my Kindle sustained a blunt force trauma to the screen and, as I discovered later, became out-of commission. I just about let this ruin my night. The same day, the sweet lady at the Baptist Student Center, where I have mentioned being heavily involved before, went out of her way to get ingredients for one of my favorite foods here in Thailand (Pork and bitter beans stir-fried in curry). She had put aside a portion and covered it so she could sell it only to me. My spirits were lifted.

The unfortunate side of these stories is not that I lost a Kindle (I have learned that Amazon is usually pretty generous about replacing them even when it isn’t just a malfunction) or that my iPhone may someday stop working and I will be “cut-off” from the “civilized” world since my smart phone no longer works. The problem is the fact that I have let myself worry about these things that I don’t really even NEED. Sure Kindles make reading books easier when you live in “the third-world,” and my iPhone keeps me constantly connected to e-mails and even allows me to call or text my other friends with iPhones in the states for free, but what about the billions who live daily without these things. I am privileged beyond explanation. These thoughts are coming from an introduction to a man tonight who I was able to learn a little from.

Suriyo is a Myanmarese (or Burmese, if you prefer) man who moved to Bangkok at the urging of his father to gain experience and improve his English speaking ability so he can bring them back to his family in Myanmar. He is not a refugee. He is a migrant worker. He began to tell me a bit of how he works as a hotel security guard in one of the more prominent districts in Bangkok. Suriyo works 7 AM – 7 PM seven days a week and is given 3 days off every month. That is an 84 hour work week. He used his day off today to come to the BSC and practice his English which was already better than I expected it to be. The hotel is supposedly working on his legality in the country and planning on providing him with a Thai identification that will allow him to freely travel back and forth between Myanmar and Thailand without problem. This man is eager to learn and he is working has hands to the bone at the same time. He could carry on a pretty advanced conversation with me with only a few hang-ups and I asked him how he had acquired such advanced English since 3 months ago he left Myanmar for the first time in his life. He told me about how he learned basic English grammatical structure in school and has been carrying around a Myanmarese-English dictionary for a year and memorizing vocabulary. This man is obviously dedicated.

Because Suriyo works such long hours, I agreed to get in contact with him and meet him after he gets off at 7 o’clock and we would work on conversation. Our new team space is only two skytrain stops from where he lives. Everything is lined up perfectly and I don’t have to tell you why. He is a man that is hungry for knowledge and I told him that I used the Bible stories for English comprehension and he was very open to that, despite his Buddhist background. I am thankful for opportunities to meet men like Suriyo who always put my thoughts back in the right directions when it comes to want and needs. I pray that we can learn from each other and I can have an influence in his life for him to take back to his family in Myanamar. He comes from the Tai Yai (or Shan) people group in northeast Myanmar. This is why I love my job. I have been given an opportunity to influence a man who will be going back to his family hundreds of miles away in a completely different country. I pray our time together is lucrative when it comes to matters of the spirit.

The reminder that Suriyo gave me is of the Nepali migrant workers that I once worked with while living in Penang, Malaysia. These men were often offered contracts to come and work and make money to send home to their families and on arrival would have all of their legal documents stolen and then were assigned jobs. They basically became slaves who earned enough money to support themselves on a day-to-day basis. I pray that this isn’t the case with Suriyo and that he does get his identification card. He was the kind of guy that you want to give everything you have in your pockets to. He was so positive and thankful for the opportunities he has and completely overlooks how overworked and (most-likely) underpaid he is. It is always a gut-check when someone comes along that puts your thinking back into perspective. I am thankful that I met Suriyo today.

Our team meets every Friday night to worship, pray and have fellowship and we all love the time that we have together, but today, Taam and I showed up late. We have a mall that is only a subway stop away and when we decide it is a good day to feel like high rollers we will go and get some Starbucks and look around at some of the shops. Our stop is always a bookstore called B2S.

B2S is an all-around cool store. It is really kind of similar to Barnes & Noble, just way more low class. Taam and I even bought some canvases and acrylic paints because, who knows?, one day we might paint some things. B2S has a fair selection of books for both English readers and Thai readers and usually the store is divided in half demographically because of the book placements, but lately I have been looking more in the Thai book sections because reading children’s through teenage level books in Thai has caused my vocabulary to grow immensely. I usually pick out the book with the busiest picture on the front because, yes, I do judge them by the cover.

I usually get a fair amount of stares when I am looking through the Thai books and I guess that the surrounding Thais are usually thinking “look at this farang trying to impress us by pretending he knows what he is looking at.” But today, as I was looking at the second Thai book of a series that I started last week, a guy about my age that worked for the store walked past and stopped to turn around and ask me “Can you really read Thai?” My Thai was stronger than his English so we communicated the best we could because my full-time translator (wife) was not around to help out since she was looking at English children’s books. O is his name. Just the letter O. You have to say it in a rising tone, too. Picture a sound similar to what a kid makes when he doesn’t get the one thing he asked for for Christmas.

O was telling me in “Tinglish” that next year he was going to be traveling to America and doing something with a YMCA program. My translator was still M.I.A. I knew enough to ask him that if he was going to be participating with YMCA in America if he had any leaning toward the Christian religion and he said “not really, I am Buddhist.” Culturally, that is always the answer. When Taam showed up we were able to speak a little more in depth and as I wrote in my post yesterday, I went for the full-on approach of telling him why I moved to Thailand without softening anything. O told me, “well I was baptized last year.” My confusion level went way up and I asked him “Why did you get baptized if you are a Buddhist, O?” He told me that he agreed with the teachings of the Bible and that he used to read it but didn’t have anyone to help him understand it. I immediately thought of Philip and the Ethiopian in Acts 8. O told me that he believed God was more of a natural thing and that he could be found everywhere in nature. I don’t know how he ended up with Deistic thoughts in a country with such a spiritual stronghold on Buddhism, but he has somehow let the Buddhist and animistic roots of Thailand mix with what he has understood from reading the Bible on his own and formulated some strange opinions. Also, I am really hoping that the Spirit of the Lord will teleport me somewhere else I am needed much like Philip and the Ethiopian if I have the same success with O.

O asked me if I would be willing to help him with his English since he is coming to America next year and said he wanted the English practice by doing Bible studies so he could understand more of how he is supposed to read it. He said he tried to get help from mormons and I almost shouted at him in the store. He promised me he would stay away from mormons and we made a deal.

O and I are planning on meeting at least once a week during the day before he has to go into work so we can do one-on-one Bible studies. I better not ever hear anyone tell me I read too much again.

One of the things that has been on my heart lately is the soft approach to sharing the gospel. I am as guilty as anybody of wanting to sugarcoat a little and leave out the rough parts of the gospel and it has really been plaguing me lately that I have had this mindset. I believe with all of my being that loving people into the Kingdom is the most effective way of showing who Christ is, but it is imperative that we understand the necessity of making clear all of the implications that come with becoming a Christ follower, especially to those who may have never heard His name.

I believe that location should have no bearing on how we communicate the message. There are both right ways and wrong to share the gospel, and we need to have an understanding of the people we are relational with, but I have noticed that I have let cultural stereotypes get in the way of how I present the message of Christ. If I let the Spirit lead the conversation, then whether or not my friends hear me out is not up to me. It hurts because I have lost opportunities with excuses like, “Well, if I say this it is just going to push them away and then I will never have another chance.” The more I think about that statement, the more I feel like cowardice has settled into my heart and I have let chances pass right by me. I don’t want to look anyone in the face and argue the fallibility of the deception that they have bought into, because that isn’t loving, but I also don’t want to be afraid to step on toes when it is necessary.

I live in a culture where religion has become a matter of indifference. But how is this different than the rest of the world? I moved to southeast Asia with fears of making the slightest wrong move and being shut out of people’s lives forever. I have done just about everything that I was told would blacklist me in the eyes of the locals by mistake and they have just laughed and continued on with the conversation. I incidentally used a pretty terrible swear word sitting in a circle of old women because I had a different understanding of what it meant. They laughed really hard and forgave me because what they saw was the fact that I was trying to communicate with them in their heart language.

When I lived in Atlanta just before moving here, I was having a conversation with my friend Kung about religion. He wanted to hear everything we had to say but in the end, his statement was “Salt tastes the same in America as it does anywhere else.” People are adopting syncretistic views about religion and that is a dangerous thing. How am I supposed to share the gospel with people in the nation I live that have adopted a blend of  several different religions? I was told that religion was a topic to stay away from as much as possible until you become close friends with people. I won’t argue with that advice. I trust people I am friends with more than I trust strangers, but what happens when the opportunity arises with someone I am meeting for the first time? In the past, I have walked on eggshells to avoid offending or hurting feelings, but the fact is, that is being a weak believer. If I can’t tell someone exactly what I believe then I am not doing my job.

I never burst into a conversation with accusations or claims of religious fallacies in this nation, but I have had many opportunities where within 10 minutes of meeting someone I have been asked “What do you think about Buddhism?” This is where I once walked on eggshells. I recently began taking a new approach. I have never told anyone outright that they are wrong, but after a question like that, without fail, I follow up with, “Can I be 100% honest with you? Because I don’t want to offend you or hurt our potential friendship.” I have NEVER been told no. They are seeking the honest truth. My generation here doesn’t have a belief system that they can fully describe to me. This makes my job a lot easier.

I have had the privilege of sharing every bit of the gospel with many students, old and young, while leading a conversation practice session. Tonight, I met a guy whose nickname is Film. Film is attending a Bible study class at the Baptist Student Center and is not a believer. He only wants the English practice and there are others just like him. My go-to verse with nonbelievers here is John 14:6, because the idea of Heaven and how to get there is so muddled here. I always use that as a starting point. Film took a Bible home tonight and said that he wanted to read more out to the book of John. I didn’t pull any punches. I answered every question he asked.

My friend Duk

In this picture to the left is my friend whose nickname is Duk. Duk means catfish (irrelevant but I can’t let it go unmentioned). He showed up to the BSC one night wearing this shirt and I asked him if he would let me take a picture and he was completely okay with it. How can you read his shirt and not hear God shouting at you to “DO SOMETHING FOR MY KINGDOM”? That is how I have been feeling lately. Duk agrees with all of my standpoints on Buddhism but he still claims it as his religion, because it is a cultural thing. Duk and I have had a lot of conversations and i feel like we have made some progress, but that isn’t up to me. I keep this picture on my phone because every time I look at it, I am reminded of the incredible need, not only here, but everywhere in our world. I pray that Duk is one day influenced by the Spirit and turns his life over to Christ, but I can’t make that decision for him. My job is to keep loving on him and being there for him when he needs me so he knows exactly what a Christian should look like. Duk lives about a 15 minute walk from me and I try to see him as much as possible because I want him to see Christ in me as much as possible. I love my job and I love the interactions that I have on a daily basis when I have the opportunity to love on these beautiful people. I just want to stop letting fear and excuses get in the way of communicating my real purpose of being here and I hope that you join with me in praying for Duk and Film and the others that I have been able to share with who have taken Bibles home to read. The Baptist Student Center has provided countless opportunities to speak into the lives of people just like these guys and I am thankful that I have found a place to plug in.

We have to do whatever it takes to get our message across and that requires loving every person we encounter. Sometimes it will drive people away, but Jesus said that many would reject the gospel. We can’t let that be an excuse to approach the message softly. We have to rely on the Spirit for the right words and I pray every day that when I encounter friends like the ones I have mentioned in this post that I have the right words to say.

It doesn’t feel right to say that I am thankful for a natural disaster that has affected millions of lives, and has even taken a few hundred along the way, but I cannot think of a better time to get people together for a unified purpose that causes individuals to put aside differences and focus on how to be productive for the best possible outcome. The disastrous flooding in Thailand is hurting this nation in every sphere of society, but it is bringing people together.

Today was going to be a day that Taam and I went and played Wii all afternoon and goofed around with Chris and Rikki Plunkett (teammates) until it was time to get home and prepare for teaching our students the next day, but Taam spotted an opportunity on Facebook to actually do something proactive about the flood situation in Bangkok. We just arrived back from Chiang Mai earlier in the week after visiting her mother with stage 4 cancer and I was torn. I wanted to spend the time with my wife’s family and I know, without a doubt, that she needed me there, but I also wanted to be in Bangkok because this situation is destroying the livelihood of Thais everywhere in central Thailand. I want to be effective, but being an uninformed white guy can sometimes get in the way of my abilities. I don’t read enough news and I don’t hear of a lot of opportunities until it is too late, so I am thankful that Taam caught this. We decided to change our plans immediately.

I called Chris and told him that we needed to postpone our hangout day because there is a hospital in a high risk area that needs volunteers to come and build sandbag walls to attempt to keep as much water out as possible. The water is contaminated terribly and even when the water levels do recede, the clean up and aid is going to take months. Chris and Rikki changed their plans as well and joined us at the hospital. I have been wanting to serve in some way of flood relief for a week, but it is hard to find an organized opportunity. (Thai people are often “spur-of-the-moment” types).

We arrived at the hospital and registered and got our set of gloves and surgical masks. The bags we were dealing with were not actually sand bags, but limestone gravel and dust, so the air was thick. I had to ditch my mask cause it was harder to breathe through than the dust. I also had to fight off a lot of insistent Thais trying to hand me more masks. I just couldn’t wear one. Looking around I realized that I was the only white guy in the whole crowd because Chris and Rikki hadn’t arrived yet. Chris is half-Korean, so technically I can still claim being the only white guy in the whole crowd.

Our Assembly Line

Everyone lined up and some of the bigger guys, including myself, climbed up onto a pile of pre-filled bags and starting loading the heavier ones onto push carts to head out to the edges of the hospital. If you have ever built a sand bag wall, then you know it isn’t easy work, especially if you are dealing with the bags that make up the base of the wall. I will be feeling my shoulders and arms tomorrow.

Taam is somewhere far in front of the line in the picture to the right because most of the women elected to get in the line that was passing the lighter bags down to build a wall around the corner you see. The resolution isn’t great because my hands are shaky and my iPhone was competing with dusk.

After loading about nine or ten carts, I had a Thai man standing next to me, who was actually enduring his surgical mask, staring at me. After a couple of minutes he pulled his mask to his chin and said “Hey, why you come here?” I knew that by asking me this his intention was not to offend. He was generally puzzled that in a crowd of Thais trying to protect a hospital, one white man was standing around breathing rock dust and sweating profusely when I could have just as easily been at my apartment watching old TV shows online. I wasn’t sure of his grasp of English so I answered in the simplest way possible, “I’m here because I love Thailand and I love Thai people and I believe that Jesus wants me to come and help out in every way that I can.” I knew that he understood me when he walked over and put his arms around me and said “Thanks for loving us.” This took me by surprise because, like in most cultures, Thai people don’t hug strangers. We got back to work and ended up getting separated into other groups and I didn’t see him again, but I am praying that by our short conversation, I conveyed enough of the love of Christ to make him think.

I love how simple it is to be a representative of Christ and I hate that every single one of us let excuses get in the way of our daily witness. It hurts to think of every conversational opportunity that I have ever had and wasted. I hope I said enough to that man to make him think, but that isn’t up to me. We HAVE to be intentional about how we communicate with those around us no matter in a good situation or bad. I am thankful I had the opportunity to mention the name of Christ to one man let him know that he is just as important to me as anyone else in this world. (At least I hope that is what he got out of the subtext)

Hearing the sound of a storm gathering strength in the distance always piques my curiosity. Throughout all of the destructive possibilities of storms, it is natural that we have equated terrible occurrences in our lives with storms that we have survived. I think about the current situation in my life concerning my mother-in-law paralleled to most of Thailand. My mother-in-law has cancer. Almost all of Thailand is under water right now. The water is flowing from the north to the south approaching Bangkok and the coming high tide is causing concern. Water is rising all around Bangkok, weakening and collapsing buildings and destroying ancient city sites and it is headed straight for us. For a few days Bangkok could be shut down. A big statement considering the enormity of this city and a population of almost twice that of Manhattan. Everyone is stocking and preparing for all potential dangers. The good thing is, we have had a lot of warning leading up to the potential of flooding.

I remember being 10 years old and home alone after school one day. My dad was at work and my mom was at Wal-Mart with my brother who would have been 3 at the time and a storm was coming. I was always scared of tornadoes as a kid and, more often than not, my fear was irrational. I have always been one for over-thinking. Anything that I can analyze into a 100 different possibilities gets stretched through my brain and I always end up focusing on my worst thought up ideas. When any storm approached my mind raced to destruction of everything I loved. I was especially sympathetic for our dog at the back of our yard. She was much too far away to help. I would pray that the guaranteed destruction would miss her.

When this particular storm was coming, something was different. I walked outside for just a minute to look at the sky and something just felt strange. It was stranger than my typical worries or over-thoughts. I knew a tornado was coming. This time it was rational! Validated! I was pale faced and terrified. I think I walked off the fear enough to play like I was a tough kid that could have handled anything before my mom got home. I hadn’t even seen anything. No tornado. A few pieces of hail on the ground were all I had to show for my unnecessary fear. I found out after my mom got home that there had been a tornado. It jumped around in our neighborhood and caused a little damage there but crashed right through the house of a friend of mine. Fortunately, they had a basement and stayed safe while half of their house was ripped apart. We aren’t always surprised. The warnings come and people know to be on the lookout. Right now, the flood warnings are coming and instant noodles and water and sandbags are disappearing everywhere. Bangkok is bracing.

Sometimes we don’t get those warnings when it comes to personal storms. My entire life was an example of a storm for my parents. I was a prime example of chaos onset with no purpose or explanation. I can’t even answer why I rebelled when I did. I just began seeing everything differently and accepting my vision of the world through a lens that I knew was scuffed up and dirty. That storm raged for about 3 years and then died out almost as suddenly as it started.

Health, or lack of, is the current storm my wife and I are facing. Her mom went to the doctor for some tests with some pain in her arm and back and they found lungs completely saturated with cancer that had already spread to her bones. No early warning. It is far more progressed than we wanted to hear, but it isn’t a shock. She was a smoker for at least 2 decades. This storm showed up and we weren’t ready for it. We are trying to get in our shelter, but sometimes it seems like the debris is coming too fast to run out into the open even briefly. If we try to stay boxed up and protected by our own strength, this storm will crush us. But sometimes it is hard to become completely vulnerable to get where we need to be. It is difficult feeling helpless when your best friend says “What are we going to do?” and you feel like you have no answer. I had the only answer. Pray. We have to pray. It is the only thing we have. It is the only way to make sense of this mess. It should have never been a last resort. Alas, we are human. We don’t always get our priorities lined up right.

We have constantly prayed for salvation. Not health. Now we are praying for salvation with a rider of healing and health. We are broken. The only thing thing we have is our Father, and that is the only thing my mother-in-law doesn’t have. We are desperate to see her come to the faith. Her dad ran out of time for that decision. Her mom still has an opportunity. We are praying that God draws her to Him. Our Father is the only thing we can depend on in this storm. If Taam depends only on me, I will let her down. I have never been good at controlling storms. I have always been decent at praying through them. Prayer is all we have when it comes to this storm. I’m okay with that. It is all we’ll ever need. I just hope we never need reminders.

The flood waters will come and go. The cancer has come and one way or another, it will go. We’re going to remain in our refuge for this storm and pray that it passes with minimal damage. Pray with us.

Thank you.

Language is a barrier here without question and even though we are getting better at speaking to the people we are in contact with day to day in their heart language, it is still tough at times. I get hung up a lot on words and draw a blank in the middle of a statement more often than I would like to admit. I know that when it comes to learning Thai it takes a lot of grace on the part of those people that I am speaking to. Not everyone loves teaching and sometimes it is easy to just feel completely unintelligent when you can’t communicate or when you freeze up in a conversation. It takes a lot of patience on both sides when an individual is learning  a language.

Most of the time, I don’t have any problems when I am teaching either. I have written often about the Baptist Student Center and my involvement there. I love running Conversation Corner and I get to have a lot of really good conversations that I can direct the way of my choosing most of the time. There are times that I don’t even have to direct the conversation and the students that come to practice go right to the deep questions. I love it when it is effortless like that. It makes me feel good when all I have to do is show up. Showing up consistently reminds me that I am really not the important one here and that being there is the only thing that we, as believers, really can do.

What happens when showing up offers challenges? This is what I am currently experiencing right now. How do I deal with things that get in the way of showing up? The attendance isn’t a problem. I am committed to being present at the BSC for Conversation Corner and I haven’t missed any I am supposed to be present for since I became involved with this particular ministry. The problem is a little more difficult.

I won’t use any names, though I am sure that these two people are not avid blog-readers. I have two people that are interfering with Conversation Corner’s purposes without intending any problems. Two different circumstances are present. I have a student who has been showing up lately and has an incredible desire to study English. That student also has a desire to monopolize all of my time so she can learn more and more. I don’t think that this student is trying to take advantage of the situation at all, but I think without realizing it, this student tends to “hog” the teacher. This creates issues when there are many other students present and everyone needs an equal opportunity to ask questions and learn. It is difficult to give a group attention when a person is physically grabbing your hands or tapping the table in front of you to get your attention. It is more of a funny situation but I find myself in a dilemma. I can’t approach this as I would if I were teaching something in the US. It is a delicate situation because there are so many factors involved and if I approach it with the slightest wrong move. I can create humiliation or tension where it need not be present. I have been really struggling with this situation because I admire the student’s will to learn English but I am stumped when it comes to making clear that I am not coming for only one student. I am there for as many people as I can help at once.

The other situation is from a different angle. There is an educator who wants many students to make progress. It is admirable that this person really invests in students and wants to see them succeed. The issue that I have been experiencing is really a case of good intentions gone awry. I tell many teachers to let their students know if they want a little extra practice between classes that we are always working on phonetics or vocabulary on the main floor and are willing to help anyone with questions. I have learned to juggle a fair number of people and there is usually around 3-6 students who will gather around one person involved with conversation corner. The number of students that come to participate in our conversation corner is always directly proportionate to the amount of people we have helping out. If we have a few students from LifePoint like we did in June, we can fill several tables. Conversely, if there is only 1 person teaching, there is only so much attention that can be divided out. There is my situation. An educator brings students to conversation corner often but brings them by the handful. We do our very best to give attention to everyone but often times people will realize that there are just too many people gathered around and they leave and we don’t see them again. This is an issue because we don’t want anyone to feel short-changed. We want to do our best but often I am by myself and have several people crowded around in a room that gets pretty noisy because it isn’t in a classroom. I don’t want to see people leave but adding 5-6 people on top of 5-6 more when you don’t have a classroom to sit in ultimately hurts more than it helps.

These are situations that aren’t big issues. I am not one to get upset easily or bogged down by a challenge, but I want to do everything to the best of my ability and I have struggled with these two challenges lately and I haven’t quite figured out how to deal with them. I have just had to have a little extra grace on hand and thank God that people are showing up because they believe I am capable of teaching them something and are willing to hear me out when I talk about why I am here. I am thankful for every opportunity and I hope that I can maintain my site every day on Christ and the reason that I am going to help those students in the first place. Because putting them beside the eternity of the people we encounter, those two problems amount to nothing.

Today was a really exciting day for me. I really enjoy being involved with conversation corner at the Baptist Student Center and after a little under a two week break, a new term began today. This is something that is going incredibly well as I have seen so many people ask Spirit-filled questions and helped a ton of people with something that I am good at: English. I love being accessible with the conversation corner because anyone can come and talk to me or whoever else is there with me. There are always opportunities to share with people thoughts and ideas about spirituality and following Christ and they are in a setting where they recognize that it is probably going to happen so you have the floor to discuss freely.

I have made some incredible connections at the BSC and some of the guys that I have been talking to regularly are becoming great friends. One of my friends is close enough that he comes over to the apartment to get help with English, and sometimes he drives the conversation to spiritual matters. I have mentioned him in tweets and my e-mail updates, but he gets closer and closer every day to declaring his faith in Christ. He is processing some tough questions that most of us will never be able to understand having been raised in a completely different setting. This is a huge decision for him but I love to watch the process because it isn’t an easy claim here. If you mean it, then it requires a lot of commitment. People here have to deal with families and the thought of everyone they know being in a different situation. You can see the strength of the Spirit when a person decides to believe in Christ as the one and only giver of Salvation.

Our team is all involved in so many things where we are seeing progress. At our weekly event where we go into a community with the purpose of making relationships by teaching kids Bible stories and English, the past three weeks we have seen a recognizable difference in the right direction. More kids are beginning to answer questions about the Bible stories that we are presenting each week and we have started seeing some teenagers coming after some of the kids leave because they want to learn English. It took us a while to see anyone older than 11, but they are beginning to come regularly and we are excited and hope that this means that some adults may starts filtering in soon. We just finished teaching the kids about the life of Joseph and this past Saturday began teaching them about the life of David. It will not be long before we are able to share the gospel with anyone that comes, but it is essential to lay down some foundations since many of the people have no concept of the things that we are teaching them.

I’m excited to see these ministries coming to life and I am praying for them to take root and take off. I hope that someday we will have raised some leaders that we can hand off responsibilities to and find another place to spread our influence. Continue to pray with me that we see effectiveness in the places that we are involved and pray for the Holy Spirit to invade the lives of the beautiful people in this beautiful country. Thanks!

One of the biggest things I am learning about living with the intention of working toward the Great Commission and trying to do my part for the Kingdom of God is that around 90% of the time the biggest part of the job is just showing up. When it comes to making disciples, our job capabilities are very limited. I can’t forgive someone of their sins, but I can tell them about the forgiveness that God offers through his son. The rest is up to God. I can’t make the decision for someone, but I can pray for them and share with them what I believe. We all have the responsibility to tell everyone we are capable of telling and a lot of times we don’t. It is easy to make excuses or to put the gospel lower in our conversational priorities and let hours slip by with the most important news that could ever be offered going completely unmentioned. I am guilty. You are guilty. All of us who call ourselves believers are guilty.

It is important to gauge the people we are making relationships with on a daily basis. Sometimes people are not quite ready for the whole weight of the gospel and it takes a few times of hearing it. Sometimes you have to start small and work so staggeringly slowly that it drives you crazy. If you aren’t going into a relationship with the intention of sharing at some point, then you are not listening to what Christ told us to do in Matthew 28:19-20.

In Thailand, we typically have to move very slowly. Thai Buddhists often have no concept of Christianity and what it means or are often confused because many people have told them that both belief systems are the same. We cannot often advance the conversation very quickly when it comes to sharing the gospel and have to pick the areas to speak on first. To a Thai Buddhist, living forever is awful. Presenting the gospel as living an eternity in Heaven sounds awful, because, according to their beliefs, they are trying to work out of being cycled back into life as a punishment for their bad deeds. Life, for a Buddhist, is suffering and the faster they are done with it, the better. As you can imagine, this creates a challenge when we are sharing the gospel. There is not really one solution to the problem here. We have to discern where people are in their spiritual search and share based on how we feel they will receive it. Sometimes we have good conversations and sometimes we don’t. Showing up is what’s important.

I have seen both positive and negative reactions here in Thailand. one of the things that I have noticed after being consistently involved with an English conversation corner at the baptist Student Center is that many people are interested without having to be prompted. These students are mostly Buddhists, but they hear the gospel because every term there are committed teachers who show up to teach them and inject bits of the gospel. Many times I have been in a conversation where someone came for the sole purpose of practicing English and ended up dropping a heavy question on me like “Why did Jesus have to die?” or “Why do you believe in Jesus?” It isn’t always that easy, but I am thankful for the times that I have showed up and been able to get into incredible conversations with hungry people.

The beautiful thing about sharing the gospel, no matter where we are, is that after we share, our responsibility is fulfilled and we have been obedient to scripture. That doesn’t mean one and done either. Being obedient always makes us feel good about ourselves, but the reality is that our responsibility is to always live the gospel of Christ and to share with those around us. Some people will hear what you have to say and most will reject it completely. If we are working toward the same goal, the goal of pushing the boundaries of the Kingdom of God further every day, then we have to show up and be ready. If you are as fortunate as I have been lately, the questions will present themselves.

I have been wanting to write part two out of three that I have in mind about the team visiting for a while now, but Taam and I have been doing a little traveling to help build her travel experience for the next time we interview for an American visa. Taam and I had several incredible days visiting Laos and I want to write a whole separate blog about that soon but I have a final post about the team’s visit after this one before I tackle anything at length about her first visit to a new country and my adding a new country to my list of places visited.

The last post predominantly covered Conversation Corner, which is a ministry that I am in a partnering leadership position of with a great guy named John Lapos that our team has a valuable relationship with. A few of our Lifepoint students had an opportunity to play a role in one of those nights and experienced the value of being a conversation partner for Thais wanting to practice English and how that works with sharing the gospel. The students had other opportunities to get close with Thais both in and out of Bangkok and in this post I want to detail a two-day excursion that we went on about 4 hours northwest of Bangkok.

Witt and Brittany Kaminh were a huge asset to the visiting team because of Brittany’s prior experience in Thailand and Witt being a Thai. Witt contacted an orphanage that he used to be involved with and set up a couple of days to visit and allow an opportunity for cultural exchange at some schools that very rarely, if ever, host teams of foreigners.

Three to four hours in a van landed us in Uthai Thani, Thailand where we jumped right into a mini English day camp at a Thai school that was connected with the orphanage and had about 60 students. We split the students into two groups and had some lead older students and the others lead the young students. The students led a few English teaching games and did an excellent job even with an awkward tension of shyness and a desire to stay quiet around Westerners. It is a difficult task to connect with a kid that is a little nervous to speak, but the students did a great job and got these kids to come out of their shells and have a blast.

After the school we went to our lodgings for the night where we would have a worship service with the local Christians in a facility in the middle of sugar cane and pineapple fields. I have never had a juicier pineapple than when Witt, Micheal Bartemus and myself picked them off of the stalk and our new friend who worked at the farm chopped them up for us to eat immediately.

The worship service went well and was joint led by both the team and the local Thai pastors. We had a great time of fellowship together and the students were able to see what an indigenous Thai church looks like, which isn’t a whole lot different from a western church (turns out they like the same stuff we do).

We had a second day of connecting with more students at another school before we headed back to Bangkok. I think a lot of new Facebook relationships were started because of these two days at rural Thai schools. I was so glad that the students were able to experience both the big city and the countryside of Thailand. It is really valuable to experience more than one setting and our student team definitely got a taste of more than one style of worship in this country.

These past couple of weeks have been absolutely loaded with things I need to be talking about on here.

Last week, we received our first team since landing and beginning to get set-up here. The whole team was anxious and ready for them to get here and experience the awesome things that a few of us get to be a part of pretty regularly. The team was made up of 20 people, predominantly students. We all hoped before they arrived that we were ready for such an undertaking. The logistics of getting 20 people around in a city twice the population of New York was not an easy thing to work out, but it went more smoothly than I could have ever imagined. I think I expected several errors, and I was so excited when everything went off perfectly and it just served as a reminder to me that we aren’t the ones in control.

The week started off with a scavenger hunt around Bangkok. This gave the team a chance to see some “high points” of Bangkok, while also helping them to become aware of the culture and spiritual oppression of this place. Only a few minutes after my “sub-team” we walked out the door, beginning our adventure, I got a call from one of the guys that we work really closely with. He and I had a communication error and he thought that we had a bunch of people manning the conversation corner that the Baptist Student Center offers for free four nights a week. That wasn’t the plan, but he needed help so I told him I would make sure to man that night and the next but would be out of town the following two nights. I called Bret and told him and he suggested I offer it to any of the students who may be wearing out and ready to stop walking around this huge city for a while. I called Taam and asked her if she could leave her adequately chaperoned group and told her that if any students wanted to come they could. Her whole group ended up there.

This is what Conversation Corner typically looks like with a few less people. One of the things that  The Baptist Student Center noticed: the more westerners, the more Thais. These people show up mostly to discuss English and get some practice working on some language exercises or just practice speaking and listening and this really gives us an opportunity to steer conversations in the directions that we would like them to take. Almost every time I have an open conversation, we end up talking about spirituality. The best part about that fact is that, most of the time, I don’t have to point our discussion that way. The people showing up want to talk about it. Most of the time they just love hearing different opinions. The best times are when you can just tell that they are hungry. I have a friend named Witt that shows up almost every single night. He is one of the most talkative of the whole group and before I could get a word out regarding religion or spirituality he looked me dead in the face and said “Seth, why do you believe in Jesus?” I used to believe those opportunities weren’t that easy, but God is really teaching me that I just need to show up and be the example that I am supposed to be. God takes care of it as long as I am willing to talk honestly about what my beliefs are. I was glad that a few of our students were able to experience this and see the opportunities that come up just from some simple English practice.

I’m going to continue this story of last week tomorrow, so check back in and get another small portion of the incredible things that Lifepoint Bangkok was able to witness and be a part of last week.