First of all, praise report: I am fully funded. A
huge thank you to everyone who supported me financially and through
prayers. In fact even though it looked quite bleak, not a single person
on our squad had to go home due to funds. Praise God. Our Father knows
how to provide.
So this month all 13 men on the squad are working
together. It’s “manistry” month. What exactly is manistry month all
about? Well, at times it’s definitely what one would expect. As I type
this the 3 guys next to me are watching a YouTube video of guys shooting
powerful guns and falling down from the force of it. In fact we shot
each other with guns today at an air soft range. We often ride places
hanging off the back of a truck. We make up absurd games like walking
touch football and hand volley pong. We laugh. A lot. And during the
days our ministry is manual labor. We dig ditches and chop and burn
brush along a fence line at an orphanage. But my favorite parts, and
what I think are truly the most manly, of manistry are the ones that may
not be the first things you think of when you think of manly.
Every
night after we’ve finished our hours of manual labor supervised by
celebrity Ron Roloff of TLC’s Little People, Big World fame we eat
dinner with the girls who live at the orphanages. These are girls from
about the ages of 5-13 who were deemed high-risk for falling into sex
trafficking. We eat with them, and we try our best to converse with them
– they learn a little English, I try to learn a little Thai. After
dinner we might help them a little with English homework, but best of
all we simply play. We sing, dance and laugh. We play games like Uno,
Thai paper, rock, scissors, Tigers and Cows, and we made one up last
night called Tunnel. We simply make a human tunnel, chant tunnel as the
girls walk under and then randomly drop the tunnel and trap them. Oh and
then they scream, laugh and beg to do it again. We also play a lot of
games where we actually have no idea what we’re doing. Probably the
favorite though is simply chase, hug and tickle.
The girls love
to be hugged or picked up. They’re orphans in an orphanage so they don’t
have dads or brothers. This month we’re the males in their life and
dang it we’re going to shower them with love. Yeah some nights I’m
exhausted, but it’s nearly impossible to deny their desire for love and
affection. So that’s what we do as men: we love them. Two guys who could
combined probably crank out 1,000 pushups use those arms to play
pattycake, a guy with a tattoo covering his neck takes part in dance
routines, and an Army medic with two tours of Iraq under his belt used
to fire fights now taking part in massive tickle fights because that’s what men of God do.
weekend my team was off, so we came into the town. We did some good
touristy stuff and visited some markets and even got a real Thai massage
(1 hour-about $6), but Saturday night we joined the two girl teams here
in Chiang Mai and hit the bars. Prostitution is obviously a huge issue
in Thailand, and Chaing Mai is no exception. There’s one main street
filled with bars which is where the men and women do business, so me and
six other guys spent our night there. There’s a physical heaviness you
can feel as soon as you enter the street so for the first hour we simply
walked the street several times praying out loud for the place and the
people. We stopped outside a strip club for a while and all prayed
loudly – for freedom, for truth, for light, declaring God’s perfection,
love and presence.
After this some of us started talking to the
girls. We were able to show them what real men look like. Real men don’t
want to buy them for the night – they want to sit and talk to them and
show them real love. A teammate Justin and I talked to a woman named An
for about an hour – the first half solely about herself and her family
and the second part about God’s love for her. She asked us once what we
did for fun like drinking or dancing, and I honestly told her there’s
nothing I’d rather be doing than talking to her about her life. Tonight
we went back again and I watched Justin play connect 4 with a young girl
whose age I’d prefer not to know for at least an hour to keep her busy
from men who might want to buy her, to let her have fun for a change, to
show her someone cares about her. That’s what men of God do.
Finally,
real men are open and vulnerable. We sit around as a group and share
our struggles. We shed our pride and admit our weaknesses. Real men sit
around a camp fire and share their stories about their pasts: the hurts
and the trials. You’ve made mistakes? That’s okay, we’re not going to
look down on you or judge you. We’re going to help you through it. Then
men build up and encourage. They speak truth and life to other men. They
point out strengths and gifts and call them into bigger and greater
things.
So I’m less than two weeks into manistry, but I’m
already aware that Godly men don’t always look like what the world says
real men look like. We don’t care though. I’m excited to be a part of
this group of men – a group that realizes sometimes the most manly thing
you can do is laugh through a game of Connect Four, play patty cake, or
engage in a tickle fight.
Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be
There is a design, an alignment, a cry
Of my heart to see,
The beauty of love as it was made to be.
A look at some of the fun we have in ministry: Papa Ron taking part in our blow dart game.
