If I Could Tell You But I Bet You Already Know: A Letter to Mom

It ambushes me over a banana leaf wrapped around my desert.

There's a piano CD playing, among many other songs you'd recognize, that old hymn that ends with the refrain, "For I know what ere befalls me Jesus doeth all things well".

Yes, He does.

I am quite suddenly wishing you were here, in this moment with me, eating a simple communal meal with mostly strangers at a Thai Presbyterian church about 10 minutes away from Hot Springs.  It's been a more formal service this Saturday morning; a special thanksgiving time of worship, complete with choir and special music and even a processional to get things started.  It's 'old church' for me.  And even though it's not my style these days, being here, especially the music, is bringing back washes of nostalgia from when I first fell in love with Jesus as a child.

Maybe it's because that's when I also decided, at the very young age of eleven, that I would go to Asia to be a missionary.  And that's when I remember you telling me your own story.  Of how you had wanted very much to be a missionary, but your childhood brain injury made the necessary education, and even the coping skills, unreachable.  And then how you had had that dream where it seemed to you that God was saying that one of your children (you were not yet married) would end up going instead.

Mom, I'm here.

I'm the only farang in this group of over 200.  I'm being greeted by the church leaders as 'the missionary from Canada' and I'm having a conversation with them in Thai.  I'm surrounded at the lunch table with beautiful, earnest believers who look very different from me but with whom I astonishingly belong.  And just now, between scoops of rice and thoroughly enjoying whatever this is in the banana leaf, I am wishing you could be here.  I think your heart would be singing.  You'd look around at all the smiling faces who love Jesus, hearing them say, as I did again this morning in the sermon, that if it wasn't for the missionaries they would never have known they had a way out of the fear and darkness of spiritism.  Mom, they are so grateful!!!

I met today two young men who are attending McGilvary College of Divinity.  

Do you know of this man?  Daniel McGilvary was one of the first missionaries to come up the river from Bangkok to establish Christian communities in Chiang Mai.  He started hospitals and schools and planted churches which planted churches which planted churches.  His heart and engagement with these people and the Buddhist way of life was clearly full of a respect and love.  He's so incarnational and real.  I'm reading his autobiography right now and feel like I've met a new friend.  Maybe you have met him, who knows? If you have and if you can, please tell him that I am in awe of the sacrifices made and have no right to be regarded in the same ranks at all.  I am fully aware I now benefit from the high regard Thais have for missionaries, likely and largely because of him.

But if you were here right now, I think you might feel, as I often do in moments like this, that all the hard things about our lives just kind of don't matter any more.  They happened, but all the sadness is being sucked out of them, and gratitude and amazement are all that's left.  Redemption in its most beautiful dress.

None of this missionary stuff happened at all the way either of us likely imagined it, certainly not the way I thought it was going to go.  It took me another forty years after my first eleven year old 'yes' to God to get here.  My story doesn't get me here until God put together the team that is Ken and I as a first step, and then waited a little longer again to put together the Thai team that is Suradet and Yupa.  It took longer still to mature us all, season us with life, both harsh and delightful, and then to introduce us, let us find out how much we love each other, and go from there to rescue some of His precious little ones.  God hasn't been stressed and rushed about any of it, it would seem.

ALL THE WAY MY SAVIOUR LEADS ME All the way my Savior leads me;   What have I to ask beside? Can I doubt His tender mercy,   Who through life has been my Guide? Heav’nly peace, divinest comfort,   Here by faith in Him to dwell! For I know, whate’er befall me,   Jesus doeth all things well, For I know, whate’er befall me,   Jesus doeth all things well.

I'm 62 and feel like I'm just getting started.

Mom thank you.

For reasons you and I both know, there's much about our family life that I prefer not to remember.  But this?  This is priceless.  What you left me in this?....Beyond my ability in any way to even come close being able to capture in words.

But I bet you know this all anyways.  I bet you do.
And maybe you can even see it happening.
And maybe you're singing right now about how Jesus does indeed do all things so very well.