It’s three o’clock in the morning. I wake up with a sense of urgency and a picture of a Thai woman, whom I don’t recognize, in my mind. The sense of urgency says pray. I don’t know what to pray for. I pray for protection, for her to feel God’s love and then I start to pray for every woman by name that I had met at the bar that night. Finally the sense of urgency subsides and I fall back asleep.
Prayer is like breathing this month. We prayer walk during the day, we worship and pray before teams go out to the bars, we pray fervently as we ministered in the bars, and we intercede for our sisters ministering on Bangla Road on the nights we stay back.
I pray that Olive will meet us outside the bars during the afternoon for a date. I pray she feels the love we have for her. I grow excited the night she asks if we are coming back. I say yes. My prayer is answered when she and her friend Taylor say they will meet us on Friday afternoon. My prayer is answered again when they both Olive and Taylor come.
We have a great time talking about their families and about silly things. They teach us Thai words and we all laugh as we try to grasp the tones of the Thai language. We talk about how they don’t like their jobs, but they need to make money. We talk about their children living far away with their parents. We tell them about SHE, that there are other options for them to support themselves and their families besides selling themselves at the bars. We leave with Olive and Taylor asking if we were ever coming back to Thailand. We say we don’t know and we hug these precious women as we say goodbye.
I pray. I pray that the seeds planted in the hearts of Olive, Nancy, and Taylor will come to grow as other volunteers continue to build into them. I pray they get out and sometimes when I don’t have the words to pray I just sit and know that God’s got this, that the Holy Spirit is interceding with groans that words cannot express.
