For This

It's another Thai-style  Saturday at Hot Springs.

 Starts early enough as does every day, with sleepy voices singing worship and reciting Scriptures.  Jaroen leads with the guitar. while Praweet tries to wake up.  Ahjahn Suradet is talking about seeking God's wisdom, moving us through Proverbs 21, and encouraging us to embrace the day with joy.  We pray for David, and Laywee and Eak who are on a school trip to Bangkok for three days.  We pray for Praweet who will be playing in a cricket match today.  We pray for Kuhn Linda, for healing and strength.  And of course we pray for every sponsor of every child.  We do this twice every day; here in the mornings, and then later after supper when we will be together again like this.

The sun is just rising as we are dismissed to chores first, then breakfast.  I set up my table on the porch, even though this won't be a full out desk-work kind of morning.  I only hope to get everything ready for tonight's ESL and Bible lesson, prepare a little for the short meeting Suradet, Yupa and I will have closer to lunch, and rehearse again the sermon I will bravely (and probably foolishly) attempt to preach in Thai tomorrow.

It's getting warmer sooner in the mornings.  I find by 10 a.m. it's wiser for me to come inside, even though everything in me wants to soak up as much warmth and sunshine as I can before heading back next Tuesday.

Never mind.  By 10 all the chores are done and the younger girls are wanting to work on projects for their Sponsors, and to read.

I've read and read and read this visit.  Some of the kids have completed three cards and are working on a fourth!  I should say, I've read and been read to.  These are good moments, breath-taking in their simplicity and gentleness.  After school.  After evening worship when it's cooler again and we sit down by the fire.  Book after book.  Up close with the younger ones who like to snuggle.  Around the table still having fun with the teenagers.  Little voices, changing voices, Thai voices.  I just might be able to recite Robert Munch's "Andrew's Loose Tooth" by heart by now.  And all the phonics readers from Usborne.  And no end of other treasures donated by so many who are so generous to help us learn English.  I'd recite them, but likely with a Thai accent by now.

The meeting this morning is easier than the first two, with less business, but still requires all of our attention.  These days of getting everything set up for The New Family Foundation are exciting but sometimes, to be honest, a little tedious in the details and the translation of those details.  I marvel at our ability to work though so much business together now.  Can't help but remember that first visit when I didn't know one word of Thai, and their English was very much at the beginning stages.  Figuring out when supper would be served was the big challenge then.  Now we comb through legal documents, agreements, insurance policies.   To coin a Thai phrase, "Oy!"  But I'm so honoured to be serving God together with these heroes.

After lunch I rehearse the sermon again, and feel a little more confident that maybe I will actually preach this and not just read it - poorly.  "Waiting For God" is the title, all about how we respond when God doesn't seem to be answering prayers.  I so know those times.  But I have to admit, that tomorrow I'm preaching this particular subject matter from a time that's quite the opposite.

Abundance.  Flavour.  Colour.  Warmth.  Seeing the fruition of a long investment here.  Watching God answer and come through and provide in ways I can hardly describe without sounding like I'm making it up.  But I'm not.  I'm here and it's real.  And it's so, so good.

I confess to a longing for a solid English conversation.  The first-week struggle with my Thai language skills is long over, and I've been speaking and listening and thinking in Thai with no native English speakers to speak of (ha!) in sight for the past four weeks.  And, I've been saying that I miss Ken, but I don't miss the snow.  And, yes, it's truly amazing to me that I have not one, but two sensational lives, one on each side of the planet, and I am looking forward to be home there too.

But this.  This has been so rich.  So good.  So reassuring.

I did a big thing in making this my only thing.  Last year was a big year of change and adjustment.  And likely the adjustments are not completely done yet.

But being here right now at the beginning of 2019, and having it be like this -- So much abundance.  So much flavour.  So much colour and warmth and confirmation and gratitude and being appreciated and loved.  So.  Much.  This is good.

This is why.

For this, and so many other astonishing reasons, I willingly lay it all down.
Again and again.

Four more days.

And just on curious note:
EVERY Wednesday including and since the Wednesday I left Ontario, there has been a major storm of some sort.  I am arriving home on a Wednesday.  Could be interesting.

Confessions of a Hungry Introvert

Tuesday morning and it's quiet.

 

  The children have all gone to school after a four day weekend celebrating the new king's birthday.  That means that my first four days here have been abundant with voices and laughter and reading and worship and eating birthday cake and otherwise loving and being loved.

Over. The. Top.

I am overwhelmed.

Every time I come I learn new things about me.  I know.  I come to teach.  Bible stories and ESL are part of what I do when I come.  And so far that's going well (thank you Ann and Jill for helping to get all those ideas and papers and trinkets ready for the miracles lessons).

 But every time, I am more the student than the teacher.  True fact.

And right now my lessons are layered on top of what I've been learning already in these past two months away from my community of faith.

I hesitate to even mention this again, because I think I've done so in the last five blog posts running, or something like that, and I risk rolling the eyes of my readers.  But honestly, as I sit here in the quiet of a Tuesday morning, this whole need-of-people thing is what continues to surprise the introvert in me.

I am an introvert, somewhat to the extreme, in that I would say that I get my batteries recharged by being alone.  And solitude and silence are gifts to my soul.  And in all my ministry years, past, present and on into the future, my greatest challenge has always been and will always be how to balance this out.  Because....people.

These past weeks away from people I have experienced a beautiful, wretched need that, to be honest, normally I do not.  It's intense and real and uncomfortable and pressing me in ways wonderful and true.  I need my peeps.  I do.

Being here now, and the way this is filling me up, well frankly, sometimes it makes it hard to breathe.

Oh my!

How astonishing delightful it is to sit in the circle and sing together songs I am increasingly able to understand (thanks here to Esther's song book) in the mornings and evenings. 

How simply, deeply good it feels to be surrounded by sweet faces at the tables under the dining shelter, eating birthday cake (thanks here to Deborah and Lawee and David for being born in July) and having nothing else to be doing than just sitting and enjoying the looks on their faces as they devour the very special treat.

How comforting to my away-from soul to sit together for meals (something that's happening more and more as in the beginning I was more usually on my own to eat) and have long, unhurried conversation (which, again, I am increasingly more able to understand), about life and ministry and dreams for the future.  And this with the added bonus of sensing that, while we will always miss Bee, something of the dreadful long night of grieving has passed and joy dominates this place again.

And I am greedy for it all.  The being-with thing. 

Oh my people!  Here and at home!  How I need you!  Desperately, wretchedly, deeply simply, shockingly.

It's an interesting place for an introvert to be.  But it makes sense.  The theology of it is brilliant.  How better to prove that God intended us to do life in family, in community, with each other, than to take an introvert away from it for a while and see what it does to her soul?


I feel a self-induced research paper coming on (she said, robbing the moment of any poetry).  Only my fellow student-geek friends will understand this, I know.  But it makes me want to go looking for how I may have missed some nuances in my Bible before this, even having preached on it so many times before.

Tuesday morning and it's quiet.  And that's okay.  For now.  By four I'll be ready to greet them again.  We've got some serious reading to do if we're going to get this book club thing done before I leave.